Great line in Andrew Ross Sorkin’s Dealbook post yesterday (“What Goes Before a Fall? On Wall Street, Reassurance”):
More likely than not, when we start seeing pictures of C.E.O. perp walks, the crime won’t be theft or some other kind of financial chicanery, it will be some kind of fraud — probably lying to the investing public.
“If there are ways people in this room go to jail, it’s probably through crimes of upholstery — the cover-up will kill you,” Joseph A. Grundfest, a professor of law at Stanford University who is a former commissioner of the Securities and Exchange Commission, said at a class for directors of the nation’s Fortune 500 that I attended in 2002 in the aftermath of Enron’s collapse. It’s a great line that I’ve never forgotten.
