The laws obviously cannot prevent all fraud. But the least they can do is make fraud relatively difficult. Some of the examples you provided were fraud, but the

The laws obviously cannot prevent all fraud. But the least they can do is make fraud relatively difficult. Some of the examples you provided were fraud, but they were relatively difficult to pull off, as opposed to what would happen if there were no securities laws. (Some of your examples, were not fraud but just stupid decisions.) For example Enron had to work hard to fool all those accountants, and as a result one of the largest accounting companies in the world went under and many of its partners are still mired in lawsuits. The banks created a very convoluted system to mislead investors as to the value of their securities, which involved a lot of new legislation, somehow tricking or corrupting the ratings agencies, controlling markets, etc. So scams happen, but they are not as easy. Of course I think securities laws could stand improvement. But we do not have the case where there are so many scams on the stock market that everybody assumes that everything is a scam and nobody invests, so the stock market is essentially useless. This is the case for many (actually most) countries.