Arthur Levitt
Arthur Levitt
Arthur Levitt Jr.was the twenty-fifth and longest-serving Chairman of the United States Securities and Exchange Commissionfrom 1993 to 2001. Widely hailed as a champion of the individual investor, he has been criticized for not pushing for tougher accounting rules. Since May 2001 he has been employed as a senior adviser at the Carlyle Group. Levitt previously served as a policy advisor to Goldman Sachs and is a Director of Bloomberg LP, parent of Bloomberg News...
NationalityAmerican
ProfessionPublic Servant
Date of Birth3 February 1931
CountryUnited States of America
This effort will be an important addition ? to encourage the education of fund directors,
The motivation to satisfy Wall Street earnings expectations may be overriding common sense business practices, ... In the process, I fear, we are witnessing a gradual but inexorable erosion in the quality of financial reporting.
It has been almost 30 years since significant steps were taken to improve the mutual fund governance structure, ... Whether shareholders realize it or not, how directors fulfill their responsibilities directly affects them every day.
It is incumbent on us to facilitate the development of a market structure that best assures that these changes benefit the U.S. securities markets as a whole.
Our markets have not achieved their great successes as a result of government fiat, but rather through efforts of competing interests working to meet the demands of investors and to fulfill the promises posed by advancing technology.
That also has put pressure on analysts to report favorably on a company in order to maintain access to inside information,
Once again, stock markets have been threatened with extinction for almost 75 years, and I have found that stock markets are harder to kill than roaches.
If you compensate a CEO by giving him options, he's going to do everything he can to make those options as valuable as possible.
he said. ''I would hope the decision would be reversed upon appeal.
These issues are not academic or peripheral -- they directly affect every mutual fund investor. ... One word above all must define a fund's overall management structure. That word is accountability. And, without strong independent directors, accountability is nothing more than words on a page.