To my thinking, a chairman of the Securities and Exchange Commission is good at his job if investors are protected from dangerous risks (fraud or otherwise) during his tenure. By that yardstick, Christopher Cox was not a good chairman of the SEC.
Still, even as many people celebrate Cox’s departure from the SEC last week, and everyone waits for Mary Schapiro to take the reins and churn out all manner of regulation under the Obama Administration, we should take some time to study exactly what Cox did accomplish at the SEC—because it holds some instructive lessons for how we might want to piece corporate regulation back together in 2009.
