Leader: The bright side

Just when things seemed to be settling down a bit, along came Ahold and HealthSouth with yet more off-the-charts financial scandals to drag corporate trust through the muck again. It will take several reporting periods without a major financial scandal to restore investor confidence. But some say things are not as dire as they seem and that it's important to treat companies like these as just a few bad apples. The truth is no matter how much regulators strengthen accounting and corporate governance,