Here's a 'Seeing Eye Dog' for the SEC

It was Chris Byron, I think, who once referred to the financial press as the "seeing eye dog" for the Securities and Exchange Commission and other clueless regulators. That's a wonderful, and true, image. The SEC pursues cases against stock fraud, but it also wastes large amounts of times on rulemaking exercises (such as pandering to naked-shorting crackpots) that are pointless and wrongheaded.

In the spirit of helping along these chronically inept bureaucrats, I offer up a website that a reader just referred to me, listing companies whose stocks are pushed via email spams. That's a glaring red flag for stock manipulation. Spams are running far ahead of last year's rate, according to one count.

Go to it, guys. This kind of thing can keep you busy while you look for that all-important post-SEC job in private industry.

© 2006 Gary Weiss. All rights reserved.

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Wall Street Versus America was published by Penguin USA on April 6.
Click here for its Amazon.com listing and here for more information on the book, from my web site.