Daily Archives: March 18, 2015

What Does it Take to Get Fired at the SEC?

By William K. Black
Quito: Happy St. Patrick’s Day 2015

“Yves Smith” has a distressingly wonderful column in her blog, NakedCapitalism, on the SEC’s Andrew Bowden.  The SEC Chair, Mary Jo White, needs to read it and walk to Bowden’s office and tell him she needs his resignation letter on her desk by noon or she will terminate his employment.  When the SEC appointed Bowden as its lead examiner it put out a press release that purported that his unit was hiring folks from the industry like Bowden, which was going to make it a competent, kick-ass regulator.

“The SEC’s National Exam Program conducts inspections and examinations of SEC-registered investment advisers, investment companies, broker-dealers, self-regulatory organizations, clearing agencies, and transfer agents. OCIE has adopted a risk-focused examination program, hired industry experts, leveraged technology to increase efficiency, and launched a training program focused on quality and consistency. These initiatives have enabled OCIE to more effectively fulfill its mission to promote compliance with U.S. securities laws, prevent fraud, monitor risk, and inform SEC policy.”

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The Millennials’ Money (part 3)

By J.D. Alt

Commentary on part 2, again, was extremely helpful and much appreciated. Especially useful were suggestions from readers who “didn’t recognize” my description of the Boomers ideological obsession. This got me to substantially rethink the framing, and I hope that is now fixed. What I realized—and looking back on my own experience, it seems obvious in retrospect—was that what the Boomers were focused on had little to do with the idea of “competition” and much to do with rebelling against (and distrusting) institutional power—especially the institutional power of the federal government. It became natural for them to want to starve that government to keep it from interfering with the individualism the Boomers championed. As I said in my comment to the post, “Do your own thing” seems to have morphed seamlessly into the “trickle-down” economics of federal austerity.

Draft of the next section is as follows:

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