I have been very vocal about the absurdities of the Sarbanes-Oxley regulations for public companies.  Sarbanes-Oxley was supposed to prevent financial fraud.  It was also supposed to prevent American public companies from hiding risky investments (keeping them off of their balance sheets).

A great indictment of Sarbanes-Oxley appears in the latest issue (14 April) of Fortune magazine by Bethany McLean (Bethany is the writer who first uncovered fraud at Enron).   Bethany states: "[SarbOx} turned out to be perfectly irrelevant to the current crisis."  She goes on to compare SarbOx to the French Maginot Line that was supposed to keep the Germans out of France prior to World War II.  Or as she aptly states: "We build fortifications to stop the Germans - or in this case, the business world's 'innovations' - only to have them go around the line and destroy us from another direction."

SarbOx has proved that the USA now has another pile of regulations and red tape that did nothing to protect the general public.  And august institutions such as Citibank, Bear Stearns and dozens of others (all public and all compliant with Sarbanes-Oxley) went on their merry way and helped create one of the biggest financial crises in American history.