For the Securities and Exchange Commission, which operates on a fiscal year that ends every September, Oct. 1, 2009, could not come soon enough. It seems almost beyond dispute that the agency’s fiscal 2009 was the most dismal in its history, and perhaps the most transformational.
Now it feels like decades ago, but at the beginning of the 2009 fiscal year, Christopher Cox was chairman of the SEC, Linda Thomsen was director of Enforcement, SEC Inspector General H. David Kotz was unknown, and few people outside of Wall Street had ever heard the name “Madoff.” How things change. As fiscal ...