I think Sarbanes-Oxley is a terrible law - Milton Friedman on SOX.
Filed in archive SOX by leon on January 06, 2006

No surprises then that he attacks Sarbanes-Oxley as bad law in this interview. Consider the following:
"I think Sarbanes-Oxley is a terrible law...Here you say to every CEO in the country: you've got to swear to the accuracy of things you can't possibly know. You're going to make a perjurer of him. And you say to him, for God sakes whatever you do, don't take risks. We've been having something of a slowdown, not in the economy
as a whole thanks to the housing boom. But in what I describe as the healthy party of the economy: manufacturing, services, etc., the free market part of the economy. And one of the reasons why I think we've been having this slow down is because Sarbanes-Oxley is saying to CEOs, for god sakes don't take any risks. And yet progress depends on doing risk. You can't make an omelet without breaking some eggs."The question of whether regulation is creating more risk-averse companies is a good point. However, Friedman has no answers when asked how a free market would address the way auditors certified the accuracy of corporate accounts that turned out to be a fiction. There are some things markets just can't fix.
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