A recent article in the WSJ titled Peekaboo Powers:
"The University of Rochester's Ivy Xiying Zhang last year looked at stock market reaction to Sarbanes-Oxley, finding that the law had cost public company shareholders $1.4 trillion. This is in addition to the billions of dollars companies are spending to comply with the law's new auditing and "internal control" regulations. Much of this windfall is ironically enriching the same Big Four accounting firms that everyone in politics blamed for the original scandals."
So I may have been conservative when I said each of 168 words of Section 404 of Sarbanes-Oxley was costing us $ 1 billion. By a factor of 10.
