Stockman fraud trial puts Enron in the shade

The date has been set for what will surely be one of America's trials of the decade. Last week, a New York judge ruled that on May 4, 2009 - more than two years after he was indicted - David A. Stockman will go to trial on charges of fraudulent accounting and of misleading banks and shareholders.

Along with former colleagues who are now co-defendants, Stockman will be accused of overseeing the ruination of Collins and Aikman Corp - a Detroit-based supplier of components to the automotive industry which was founded in 1891 and supported 15,000 jobs worldwide. The sum total of the defendants' alleged malfeasance is $1.35bn.

That is a breathtaking figure even by the standards of Enron and Conrad Black. But David Stockman's trial will be uniquely fascinating because, in many ways, he is an even more emblematic figure of our age than Enron's Kenneth Lay or

Hollinger's Lord Black of Crossharbour.

The greedy yuppie culture of the 1980s, the credit-fuelled property boom of the last 10 years and, especially, the neo-conservative 'trickle-down' economic ambitions of a succession of Republican presidents, have all been embodied in this slight, earnest, dome-headed figure with his big, harvest mouse eyes and even bigger spectacles. Now, by the most acute paradox, as he stands awaiting trial, Stockman has become the living incarnation of the credit crunch and the impending crash of the Western world's economy.

From 1981-1985, David Stockman was President Reagan's budget director, the 20th century's youngest member of the US Cabinet. With his notorious "black books" of economic accounting ever present under his arm, Stockman was Washington's keeper of the holy scriptures of "the Reagan Revolution" which promised to reduce taxes, cut federal government spending and liberate the entrepreneurial spirit of American capitalism.

A former theology student at Harvard who had