Sign here: US Corporations had until yesterday afternoon to sign off company accounts under new Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) rules. Hoping to restore investor confidence, senior executives pulled out their Montblancs and scribbled signatures on statements for the SEC.

'The ends of bull markets regularly produce waves of corporate scandals, followed by periods of clean-ups. Some of the rule changes in those earlier episodes seem to have had an effect, others have been dead letters. And when markets begin to roar again, and there seem to be myriad opportunities for making money fast, clever people find new ways to bend or evade rules, no matter how carefully they have been crafted, and to mislead stampeding investors.' [Economist].

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Beggaring belief: Fortune magazine lists the 'greed' merchants, the top US tech executives who became 'immensely, extraordinarily, obscenely wealthy' by selling stock at inflated prices while investors were being told to buy.

'Executives and directors of the 1,035 corporations that met our criteria took out, by our estimate, roughly $66 billion. Of that amount, a total haul of $23 billion went to 466 insiders at the 25 corporations where the executives cashed out the most.' [Fortune].

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