This guy puts it straight.

Let's face it, London has already supplanted New York as the financial capital of the world. There are many forces behind this: the increased rationalization of financial operations in Europe, the rapid industrialization in Asia and its capital needs, the collapse of the dollar, and, not least, the extremely hostile regulatory environment in the United States, headlined by Sarbanes-Oxley and Elliot Spitzer.

There has been an unsustainable, disastrous move to criminalize what was formerly simply bad business practice. Thank god Spitzer has been consigned to the memoir desk of history.

Sarbanes-Oxley needs to be trashed. No one in his right mind would float a company in New York right now. The banking sector so completely revolves around this simple generating event that Sarbanes-Oxley is essentially an open artery in lower Manhattan, gushing blood into the Atlantic.

But then you have SOX cheerleaders like this guy, and he gets it all wrong. He thinks that SOX is a good thing because it has burdened companies with extraordinary costs, keeping them from prematurely going public and thus busting the IPO bubble (!), because companies that wish to go public now have to justify the expense of doing so due to Sarbanes-Oxley.

Unfortunately, this is how a statist mind thinks. The means justify the (attempted) ends, no matter how badly these laws trample on the rights of private property and free-market enterprise. Mr. James should ponder why these companies were able to go public before they were financially viable, and of course, why investment banks were underwriting the IPOs and why investors were buying the stock. He can start with the federal government and the Federal Reserve, whose credit bubble funded the whole mess in the first place. Then there's the sleazy behavior of Wall Street executives - most of whom came from government, or later left Wall Street for powerful positions in the federal government. Plus, there's the analysts on Wall Street who had long broken their vows of independence and became propaganda tools for various corporations who paid their investment banks huge fees, with the analysts getting huge bonuses. (Think of people such as Henry Blodget and Jack Grubman.) Then there's the accounting rules: some were just plain bad, and some of the more stringent rules were pushed back on by Wall Street power brokers and players who were protecting profits (or the appearance of profitability). And lastly, there's the Securities and Exchange Commission, which awards special "recognition" to only three credit rating agencies, creating an oligopoly and allowing perpetual conflicts of interest and a complete lack of independence, thereby misleading investors. These three credit rating agencies are paid to serve certain masters, not the investing public.

All said, simple minds turn to simple explanations in order to prop up their justifications for government obstruction and manipulation of private markets. Then I come to find out that this guy is nothing more than a cheerleading freelance writer who is paid to write uninformed fluff for leading the masses up the garden path.

Charles Mackay, in his 1852 book, Memoirs of Extraordinary Popular Delusions and the Madness of Crowds, noted that "Men, it has been well said, think in herds; it will be seen that they go mad in herds, while they only recover their senses slowly and one by one."