Q. Does the SEC collaborate with other financial regulators and law enforcement agencies internationally? Does it share information with other US law enforcement agencies? Is there interagency rivalry and does it hamper investigations? Can you give us an example? A. The SEC and other regulators - as well as two House subcommittees - have only very recently begun considering information sharing between financial regulators. This comes too late for the victims of Martin Frankel, who, having been barred for life from the securities industry by the SEC and NASD in 1992, simply moved over to the insurance industry to perpetrate a scam where investors have lost an estimated $200 million dollars. Had the state insurance regulators known this person's background, he would have been unable to set up multiple insurance companies. Failure to share information is a genuine problem, but "turf" considerations generally trump any joint efforts. XXV. Trading from a Suitcase. The Case of Shuttle Trade They all sport the same shabby clothes, haggard looks, and bulging suitcases bound with frayed ropes. These are the shuttle traders. You can find them in Mongolia and Russia, China and Ukraine, Bulgaria and Kosovo, the West Bank and Turkey. They cross the border as "tourists", sometimes as often as 10 times a year, and come back with as much merchandise as they can carry in their enormous luggage. Some of them resort to freight forwarding their "personal belongings". They distort trade figures, smuggle goods across ill- guarded borders, ignore international treaties and conventions and, in short, revive moribund economies. They are the life-blood and the only manifestation of true entrepreneurship in swathes of economic wastelands. They meet demands for consumer goods unmet by domestic manufacturers or by officially-sanctioned importers. In recognition of their vital role, the worried Kyrgyz government held a round table discussion last summer about the precarious state of Kyrgyzstan's shuttle trade. Many former Soviet republics have tightened up their border controls. In May last year, Russian officials seized half a million dollars worth of shuttle goods belonging to 1500 traders. When two million dollars worth of goods were confiscated in a similar incident in fall 2001, eight Kyrgyz traders committed suicide. The number of Kyrgyz shuttle traders dropped in 2002 to 300,000 (from 500,000 in 1996). The majority of those who remain are insolvent. Many of them emigrated to other countries. The shuttle traders asked the government to legalize and regulate their vanishing trade and thus to save them from avaricious and minacious customs officials.