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In his bullish speech to Wall Street on Tuesday, he said that the 'get rich quick' mentality which epitomised the dot-com boom is the reason why corporate America has lost touch with the standards that would have protected it from the recent wave of scandals.

That'll be it then. He also called for the sentences meted out to our fraudster friends to be doubled, and freed up an extra $100m for the Securities and Exchange Commission. A hastily assembled corporate fraud taskforce will also be deployed within the Department of Justice.

And will these measures do any good? Possibly. We all know how anti-business Bush is...

The marvellous Fifth Amendment is proving a bit of a stumbling block to the WorldCom investigation. Former WorldCom CEO Bernie Ebbers and disgraced CFO Scott Sullivan have both pleaded the Fifth to avoid giving evidence - sorry, incriminating themselves - to the House Committee on Financial Services.

Among the questions Ebbers refused to answer for fear of opening himself up to criminal proceedings were "Do you sleep well at night?" and this complex head-scratcher, "Are you a US citizen?"

The Committee was not impressed, with one member ominously saying that Ebbers should be sent to jail to prevent him fleeing to his home country - "wherever that may be".

Ebbers' problem is that he kicked off proceedings by reading a statement declaring his innocence. If you're planning to take the Fifth, you?re not supposed to say anything at all. So by talking and then, when asked specific questions, clamming up like a, er, clam, Ebbers may have been in contempt of court. Silly boy.

It gets better though. Not only did it emerge this week that Ebbers wanted to slash WorldCom's audit budget by 50 per cent before he resigned (see http://www.silicon.com/a54425 ), questions are also being asked about the $400m loan he took from the company a while back.

It appears that he used the money to buy some trees in Canada. Ebbers snapped up a 164,000-acre ranch in British Columbia in 1998 for about $60m. The following year an investment company run by Ebbers bought 460,000 acres of timberland in the US for about $400m.

At a press conference on Wednesday, Richard Breeden, the federal regulator overseeing the WorldCom probe, said: "How do you explain the fact that the board thought it was consistent with its fiduciary duties to lend the CEO $400m so that he could try and buy every tree in Northern Canada?"

If Ebbers keeps hiding behind his constitutional right to remain silent, we may never find out.

Breeden is also a little concerned about quite what the company's board was up to all this time. He said: "Not much attention has been paid to who is on the board and how many of them are cronies of the CEO and how many of them have been there for 25 years and haven't done much thinking in the past 15 years."

This beats any Dallas storyline. Not that any real US companies did anything wrong before the dot-coms came along, eh Mr Bush?