— More Than Zero trackbacks Rand’s post on Arthur Andersen, and says my connection of Andersen’s creative accounting with Clinton-era market exuberance is a stretch. Fair enough, the connection is less than obvious, until we look at a couple of things: Clinton’s SEC turned a blind eye to accounting shenanigans, failing to examine Enron’s books … Continue reading “Accounting exuberance”
— More Than Zero trackbacks Rand’s post on Arthur Andersen, and says my connection of Andersen’s creative accounting with Clinton-era market exuberance is a stretch. Fair enough, the connection is less than obvious, until we look at a couple of things: Clinton’s SEC turned a blind eye to accounting shenanigans, failing to examine Enron’s books for three years running despite obvious irregularities. The booming economy of the Clinton years was at least in part a market-driven phenomenon, and Clinton had as much of a stake as anyone in creating the illusion of a super-robust economy. Aggressive examination of high-fliers would have dampened market enthusiasm, which would have dampened the real economy, which would have been bad for Clinton. One can argue that the Microsoft suit was the proximate cause of the deflation of the tech bubble (which would have happened anyway, but later,) but that happened so late in Clinton’s second term that it didn’t matter to him politically.
The point is that Clinton had more to do with Enron, Tyco, Worldcom, and Global Crossing than Bush did, and you don’t read that quite everywhere.
