Accountants have been pinched for signing their clients' crooked ledgers, while analysts at major brokerage houses have been charged with puffing shares their firms had underwritten. And stocks, which everyone agreed were wildly overvalued, are now to be had at bargain prices. Yahoo! (No pun intended.)

The system works, in other words. The bad guys are getting nailed. Sanity is slowly returning. So why all the long faces?

Only because of the biggest conflict of interest of all: the one that dictates stock prices must always go up, forever. Everyone, the media included, is caught up in this one, a vast conspiracy that includes the issuers of stock, the holders of existing shares, and the hordes of middlemen, touts and handholders who make their considerable livings separating the rest of us from our money, and charging us for the privilege.

The routine is familiar and unchanging. Any day when the market is down is a "bad" day.

Markets are said to be "in retreat," even in a state of "panic." There is "carnage" everywhere, "blood in the streets," and other scenes of the Apocalypse. Conversely, when the market is up, it's always a "good" day. Markets, manic-depressives that they are, are said to be "rebounding," "finding their feet," and generally showing signs of ruddy good health.

But wait a minute. The stock I might have bought for $10 on Monday cannot be found for less than $12 on Tuesday. How is that "good news"? Sure, it's good for the company, and the people who already own its shares: the ones on the sellers' side of the market. But why should the interests of the buyers be so universally ignored? Especially at a time when everyone claims to be concerned about investor "confidence." For those, such as myself, who are investing for the long term, the best possible result would be a long, long bear market -- five years, 10 if we're lucky, of steadily plunging share prices, coinciding with our peak saving years. Over a long enough time frame, say 25 or 30 years, they're still almost certain to outperform all other investments. Granted, not everyone can afford to take such a long view. But those people shouldn't be investing in stocks.

The great scandal of the Nineties boom wasn't the odd fiddling of accounts by option- addled CEOs, whatever their usefulness as scapegoats: Investors who were willing to pay 30 times earnings for stocks, or about twice the historic average, are now shocked to discover they were really paying 32. No, the real scandal was the widespread promotion of the idea that stocks were something you could invest in even for the short term -- provided you knew which stocks to buy, when to get out, and of course whose professional counsel to rely on at either end.

You don't know any such thing, and neither do they. All you really know is that over long periods of time stocks tend to go up more than they go down, and that stocks as a class do rather better than other assets. But you have no way of identifying which individual stocks will outperform the market, or when the market will rise and when it will fall. You don't, I say again, and neither do the folks who claim to be able to do so on your behalf.

What you can do is to buy the average -- after all, that's about how you'd expect to do anyway -- and to diversify your holdings appropriately, across asset classes and across countries. If you diversify enough, no Enron or WorldCom can ruin you; hold onto your shares long enough, and even the current bear market will in time come to look like a blip. But if you can't tolerate the risks associated with owning stocks, including the risk that the odd CEO is a crook, you shouldn't be playing.

Tougher regulatory standards, such as are now proposed, while hard to argue against, are in some ways a trap. Your only real protection lies in the self-interest of stock issuers -- the companies found to have cheated were instantly obliterated at the hands of investors - - and the corollary that the number of fraud-minded companies to have escaped the market's scrutiny at any one time is likely to be very small.

So investors lack "confidence" in the market? They should, if by that is meant a naive faith that everyone has their best interests at heart and prices will always go up. But the biggest threat to their savings comes not from the random appearance of out and out frauds like Enron, but from the people they pay, year in, year out, to manage their investments: that 2 or 3 per cent per annum you pay in fees to the Insanely Aggressive Growth Fund, in the vain hope of beating the market, adds up to 4o% or more of your total return over a lifetime.

The people you should most be concerned about as an investor are not the lawbreakers, the corner-cutters and book-cookers, but all those decent, honest people selling you services you don't need based on knowledge they don't have.