I did not wake up this morning planing to defend the SEC after some of its employees were cited in an SEC Inspector General report for having viewed pornography on their work computers. Trust me on this.
But the headlines that are coming out today about the IG's report seem to me to be a silly effort to sensationalize an embarrassing revelation about some unprofessional employees into an implied "cause" of whatever failings the SEC was guilty of leading up to the financial crisis.
CNN:
"SEC staffers watched porn as economy crashed"USA Today:
"IG report: Several top SEC staffers surfed porn sites as economy teetered"Really, CNN? You can rationally tie those two things together here? Rep. Darrell Issa, the top Republican on the House Oversight and Government Reform Committee, also made sure to
pile on, saying it was "disturbing that high-ranking officials within the SEC were spending more time looking at porn than taking action to help stave off the events that put our nation's economy on the brink of collapse."
I have no support for this, but I bet that the tiny percentage of employees guilty of viewing pornography at work is probably right around the same at the SEC, the Congress, the Federal Reserve, and any Fortune 500 company that you might pick at random. I'm not arguing that there is any excuse for employees doing this on government or company time. I'm just saying that I suspect that this is not an SEC-specific problem, and in any event it cannot be fairly tied to the financial crisis.