Time has a good piece today on Mary Schapiro's first 15 days on the job as chairman of the SEC. The article includes quotes from Enforcement Action's Bruce Carton on the significance of the immediate Enforcement-related measures that Schapiro has already implemented.
The article confirms prior reports (
discussed here) that the top candidate to fill the soon-to-be-vacant Director of Enforcement spot is Robert Khuzami, a former federal prosecutor who is now managing director and general counsel at Deutsche Bank.
Columbia University law professor John Coffee, however, observes that "[i]t's a problem that our regulatory agencies can't find tough prosecutors without ties to the banking industry. It's unsettling that the government's revolving door always leads back to banks."
With respect to the quick-hit improvements to Enforcement that Schapiro announced Friday in a speech at the Practising Law Institute in Washington (
discussed here) — abolishing the commission's two-year old "penalty pilot" experiment and dismantling a burdensome full commission "pre-approval" process for formal orders — the article states that "experts, say it's a good start, but far from enough at an agency considered at the heart of restoring investor confidence in the US financial system:"
"These are good first steps but they aren't any silver bullet," said Bruce Carton, a former SEC enforcement officer and publisher of the securities enforcement report, The Securities Docket. "These are all bureaucratic obstacles that never should have been there in the first place," Carton said. "It will certainly expedite things, but it won't catch a Madoff. Real change, he said, "is all about putting more people in enforcement and training them."
Read the Time article