NEW YORK, Dec. 29, 2003 (PRIMEZONE) -- Investrend Communications, Inc.: Variously described as the "Huey Long" of the financial community, champion of the little investor, either a thorn in the side of or a dagger in the heart of the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission, or simply "Wall Street Czar," it should come as no surprise that Eliot Spitzer is the first Financial Industry "Person of the Year."
Time Warner's (NYSE:TWX) Time Magazine had him on its list of global candidates for "Person of the Year," and The Washington Post's (NYSE:WPO) Newsweek has just anointed the 44-year-old New York Attorney General as a possible Vice Presidential running mate and future President. If so he has taken a strange road, knocking heads among those that are the biggest source of campaign funds, going after such venerable Wall Street institutions as Citigroup (NYSE:C), but not above joining with Justice Department targets such as Microsoft (Nasdaq:MSFT) to go after spammers.
Spitzer already has a website, http://www.spitzer2006.com -- not to be confused with his "official" one, http://www.oag.state.ny.us -- devoted to him, but which conveniently doesn't say Spitzer for "what."
Despite his victories -- he engineered a settlement with ten investment banks over "tainted research" -- he has detractors.
His most recent foray, to convince mutual funds to "lower" their fees even though no law is being broken, is causing some to suggest Spitzer has gone from prosecuting to preaching, and from preaching to meddling, setting himself up as a policy czar. "His tactics often trigger controversy," said Dow Jones' (NYSE:DJ) Wall Street Journal in a recent article, noting that even "regulators at the Securities and Exchange Commission are arguing behind the scenes that Mr. Spitzer has no business telling fund companies how much to charge investors."
Spitzer is a former clerk to U.S. District Judge Roweret W. Sweet and lawyer at Paul Weiss, Rifkind, Wharton, and Garrison, as well as Skadden, Arps, Slate, Meagher and Flom, and a partner at Constantine & Partners, and he likes to be known as "The People's Lawyer."
Meanwhile, his baiting of William Donaldson has drawn retorts from the SEC Chair, and in the process, resulted in a strained partnering that has left investors on the downslope looking up while first New York and then the SEC, or vice versa, rush to upstage the other. Some detractors point out that investors have lost trillions while the two are rushing to settle for millions just to keep from being last in the courthouse.
2003 was a banner year, producing literally dozens of candidates -- mostly infamous -- for the financial industry's "Person of the Year," but in the end, "the scales tipped towards Spitzer," who despite anyone's opinion, is easily the Godzilla of Wall Street, noted a spokesperson for FinancialWire (www.financialwire.net) and its parent, Investrend Information (www.investrendinformation.com), where the full story is located on the web.