Havey Pitt --- good guy?

[Joubert[$]]

Hey, business news junkies. Debate over Harvey Pitt running the SEC is nothing new, but the guy gets hammered by more stories than most politicians. Do you believe there's a "where there's smoke, there's fire" issue going on, is he simply misunderstood, suffer from bad PR, what?

Meanwhile, the Washington Post is reporting that when Pitt met with Xerox execs in December, SEC lawyers advised him not to go.. So, for a smart guy, he acts dumb. He was already under fire in December.

What makes the whole Xerox issue worse to my thinking was that they were his top-shelf client when he was private sector. I know he didn't want to burn the bridge, but it's just plain stupid to override the attorneys like that.

[kurt_messick]

Hmmm, let's see...

Politicians, doing something stupid, looking like their putting their own self-interest first?

No, never happens.

[Joubert[$]]

Yeah, but he wasn't a politician before he took that dumb SEC job.

[brian_igo]

Harvey Pitt reminds me of the story Molly Ivins tells about the Texas scoundrel who ran for office. After winning the election he got his staff together and told them, "Okay boys, stealing's out."

The problem with Pitt isn't his convictions. He, like everyone in the Bush administration, has been an evangelical free marketer for longer than anyone can remember. The problem is, events have kicked those convictions in the groin. Draw whatever conclusions about Andersen's shenannigans with Enron, Sunbeam, Waste Management and the Baptist Foundation of Arizona you want, but one point is unmistakably clear: In an absolutely free market, there will be those who will manipulate and lie to increase their profits.

If the question after that is if governement has a role in preventing those abuses, we can have a debate. But where Pitt gets into trouble (unlike Paul O'Neil) is that he claims to have undergone a battlefield conversion of sorts. After working all his adult life to restrict government oversight in accounting and markets, now he says he can be a fair agent of oversight in protecting investors. That invites suspicions of hypocracy or deception.

I would feel more comfortable with Pitt if he had the stones to say, "You bought Enron because you believed it could create 20% annual growth honestly? What, you couldn't find a Ponzi scheme to invest in?" But that's not happening. Pitt is trying to play both ends of the spectrum and that will cause some to ask, "What, you fought regulation all those years because you never heard of Ralph Nader?"

The current round of accounting and business scandals was facilitated in large part by the effort of people like Harvey Pitt and Phil Gramm and Joe Lieberman, who manipulated the public trust for personal gain. But that would not have been possible if greed were not motivating them, everyone at Enron and the people who bought the stock. No one was held at gunpoint.

I personally believe government does have some role in ensuring fairness and transparancy in the markets. But until someone devises a way to outlaw greed, nothing can protect people intent on cleaning up on the next big thing.


Brian