“We have it within our power to take sensible, effective steps to ensure that US markets are the most fair, efficient, transparent and attractive in the world. The question is, can we find the political will to take them,” asks the Commission on the Regulation of the US Capital Markets in the 21st Century, in its March 2007 report. New York City (NYC) is losing business; its prized title as the world centre for capital markets is contested from abroad and, for those fighting to keep it, the rallying cry is “reform”. Reform of the immigration restrictions that are starving the city of talent, of the regulations brought in to prevent recurrence of the disastrous corporate scandals that marked the beginning of the 21st century and of the structure and culture of regulation. The city wants to be loosened of its regulatory chains.
But New York’s current restrictions are in place for a good reason. This is the city that became a hunting ground for then district attorney Eliot Spitzer early in the century, as he exposed the duplicitous analysts inflating the dotcom bubble. Then there were the tragic terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001; border security across the US was tightened as a result. Further blows came as Enron, WorldCom and Tyco International demonstrated that corporate oversight was open to abuse. These scandals reduced the ‘Big Five’ accounting firms to four and engendered the toughening of corporate governance with the introduction of the Sarbanes-Oxley Act.
