All investment is an act of faith, and faith is earned by integrity. In the long run, there’s no capitalism without conscience; there is no wealth without character. PRESIDENT GEORGE W. BUSH When booms go bust, they tend to flush out companies that have, in the giddy spirit of bullish excess, been less than forthright about their books. The last bust was no exception. The Enron scandal, the ur-fraud, began coming to public consciousness in fall 2001, and Enron declared bankruptcy by December. That was the biggest such bankruptcy ever until July of 2002, when WorldCom finally tumbled into its own fantastic imploding sinkhole. Those two remain the heavyweight champions of corporate fraud, but throughout 2002 and 2003, a wave of lesser corporate scandals, from Adelphia to Xerox, revealed “accounting irregularities” in the billions of dollars. “Accounting irregularities” is North American euphemese for senior executives and their chums on the board contriving utterly bogus financial statements, swindling their shareholders, employees, and the public, and absconding with millions and millions of dollars.
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