In a Sunday op-ed piece in the NY Times, Michael Lewis and David Einhorn argue that the revolving door of SEC enforcement attorneys to high-paying Wall Street jobs is a deterrent to the SEC working hard to penalize serious corporate and management malfeasance. They state:
[A]nything the S.E.C. does to roil the markets, or reduce the share price of any given company, also roils the careers of the people who run the S.E.C. Thus it seldom penalizes serious corporate and management malfeasance — out of some misguided notion that to do so would cause stock prices to fall, shareholders to suffer and confidence to be undermined. Preserving confidence, even when that confidence is false, has been near the top of the S.E.C.’s agenda.
