Six Months Is Plenty Of Time To "Hide A Body"

Submitted by QTR's Fringe Finance

As many including myself recently have noted, we are already living through an extraordinary age of financial grift, accounting games, promotional fraud, speculative mania and almost total contempt for basic investor skepticism.

The SEC’s apparent response is to consider giving public companies less frequently required financial disclosure in the face of demonstrable public disapproval of the idea. You genuinely can not make this shit up.

At a moment when public markets increasingly resemble a casino operated by executives, influencers, investment bankers, meme-stock promoters, crypto carnival barkers and apparently untouchable fraudsters, the agency responsible for protecting investors is moving toward allowing companies to disappear behind the curtain for six months at a time. That’s plenty of time to “hide a body” in the accounting world.

According to The Wall Street Journal, the SEC is expected to proceed with a version of its proposal allowing public companies to report comprehensive financial results twice a year rather than quarterly, even after receiving more than 200,000 public comments, most of them opposing the change. Many commenters warned that the proposal would deprive investors of information, let companies operate behind closed doors and allow fraud to fester.

No sh*t.

Apparently the public can see what the Securities and Exchange Commission cannot: when markets are already saturated with deception, euphoria, leverage and narrative-driven bullshit, the answer probably isn’t to give corporate management teams an additional three months to conceal deteriorating financial conditions.

The SEC officially proposed the change on May 5. Under the plan, companies could file one new semiannual Form 10-S instead of three quarterly Form 10-Q reports. Chairman Paul Atkins has described the proposal as part of his “Make IPOs Great Again” agenda, arguing that greater flexibility could encourage companies to enter and remain in public markets.

What a slogan. Not proposing to make accounting more reliable, punish executives who mislead shareholders, improve audit quality or help ordinary investors compete with institutions that purchase satellite data and scrape credit-card transactions. Proposing to make IPOs “great again” by letting companies tell their owners what is happening less often.

There is nothing populist about expanding the informational advantage enjoyed by executives, insiders, hedge funds, private-equity firms and institutions with access to management. There is nothing populist about telling ordinary investors to sit quietly for six months while insiders...(READ THIS FULL COLUMN 100% FREE HERE).