From a story that ran today in the Financial Times:
“The Livedoor case was expected to lead to criticism of the dark side of Koizumi’s reforms. That is what is starting to happen. It is not just about Takebe anymore,” says Takao Toshikawa, editor of Insideline, a respected current affairs magazine.
Nonsense. Such criticisms are entirely misplaced and such links are forced. If anything, the reforms should be faulted for not going far enough by putting in regulations to prevent the kind of stuff Horie was doing. As the Economist recently put it:
[Horie’s] practices were pretty traditional, but he used them with a speed, aggression and visibility that were new. Many of the things he is known to have done were perfectly legal, such as using after-hours share trading to build up large stakes in target companies, or exploiting artificial liquidity shortages after stock splits. In a properly regulated financial market they would not be. Nor would his accounting have been allowed to be as obscure as it was, whether or not it is proven to have been illegal.
Then we have this from the same FT story:
“We will continue to pursue this aggressively.The LDP is polluted with money that Horie raised by deceiving (Livedoor’s) individual investors,” a DPJ official said.
I am laughing that this guy can even make such a claim with a strait face!
Here are some strange bedfellows for you — anti-reformers who will do anything to link Horie and Koizumi, and politicians who act as though individual investors actually matter and that they actually care about the source of their money.