Jonathan Weil reports:
It's bad enough when a company's outside auditor is a pushover for management. Equally galling would be for the auditor to try telling management how to run the company. Yet that's what U.S. Senator Charles Schumer has asked the Big Four accounting firms to do at the subprime lenders they audit, pronto.Suprime Chuck(Democrat-Fannie Mae).
``One of the most promising solutions to the anticipated foreclosure crisis is the voluntary modification by lenders of existing unsustainable subprime loans,'' Schumer, a New York Democrat, said in an Aug. 23 letter to the firms' top executives.
The chairman of Congress's Joint Economic Committee then called on the firms to ``assist this country's mortgage crisis'' and ``urge your clients to do their part to keep our housing markets afloat, by modifying subprime loans that are at risk of default.''
In so doing, Subprime Chuck made a blithering fool of himself, though he probably doesn't realize why. So far, none of the four firms -- PricewaterhouseCoopers, Deloitte & Touche, Ernst & Young, and KPMG -- has responded publicly to his plea for lobbying help.
