More Dot Com fall-out?

For those who want to blame all the current Wall Street frauds (Enron, WorldCom, et al) on Bush, consider Bay Area has seen rise in corporate fraud:

Even before Enron, WorldCom and President Bush's call for a crackdown on corporate crooks, local executives have been hauled into Bay Area federal courts in unprecedented numbers in recent years, accused of cooking the books, lying to securities regulators and insider trading.

In fact, as the president Tuesday declared a fresh emphasis on cleaning up company boardrooms, federal prosecutors in Oakland were culminating a nine-year investigation with the trial of a former executive accused of orchestrating one of Silicon Valley's earliest investor fraud scandals.

Personally, I think it's all an outgrowth of the dot-com eruption. Little companies made major bank on little more than promises. When the bubble burst...well, that's history. Large companies saw how it was done and started instituting similar "tactics." This didn't happen overnight, or over the course of a single year. Unfortunately, the collapse can happen much faster.