Michael Lewis on Capitalism's Worsening Coach Class

I have been pounding on the Sarbanes-Oxley disaster from the first days of this blog (i.e. here and here and, my favorite, here). My contention has been that Sarbox achieves the opposite of what it was intended to achieve, basically it screws the little guy rather than protects him. At first it would seem that SARBOX was only driving small companies from the public markets, but then very large companies started to get taken out, and now there are rumors that even the most humongous companies are candidates for escape from the public markets. Inarguably, Private Equity is ascendent and you get the sense that these guys are laughing all the way to the bank at the expense of all the suckers and it was all brought to them by the US Congress. How much sweeter can it get? Well, esteemed author and financial industry commentator Michael Lewis has more than gotten that sense. In this article, Lewis says we've gone beyond the First Class/Coach Class dichotomy of capital markets to the point where we now have essentially two markets. Read the whole thing. The Hong Kong and London stock markets aren't the only ones thanking Mr. Sarbanes and Mr. Oxley.