You’ve got to feel a bit of sympathy for SEC Chairman Christopher Cox these days. The SEC faces a Gordian knot on the regulatory front, certainly. But the SEC also faces a deeper, more serious political crisis: It is becoming irrelevant in the conversation now occurring across Washington to decide what should happen next. Cox is on the outside looking in, and that is not where any policy-maker wants to be. It is not where companies regulated by the SEC—that would be you—should want him to be, either.
The Cox Irrelevance Factor has become apparent in any number of ways recently. Foremost, you could see the irrelevance by not seeing Cox himself in the numerous Congressional hearings lately into the Wall Street meltdown. That hearing of the House Oversight and Government Reform Committee, where Alan Greenspan was grilled for four hours? Cox was there; he just received scant attention. His testimony consisted of a) giving a history of how regulators, himself included, missed the scope of the crisis; and b) calling for a merger of the SEC and the Commodities Futures Trading Commission. That’s pretty much it.
