Regulation: Always about people

The Big Picture has an excellent piece on the Securities and Exchange Commission leadership  during the Bush administration:

His first appointment, Harvey Pitt, was a securities industry defense attorney and was wholly unsuited to the position.

The next SEC Chairman Bush appointed was William Donaldson. He is the one who allowed the net-cap rule to be exempted for the five biggest banks in 2004. Instead of 12 to 1 leverage, banks levered up 30 and even 40 to 1 after the waiver.

Then there is Christopher Cox, a stumblebum of an SEC Chair. Cox was more hapless than anything, unable to successfully navigate the fierce lobbying thrown up by Wall Street.

While the SEC is a model institution, regulation and enforcement is always about people...there is a lesson for India in this historical mess - Lee

P.S. One sentence caught my eye..

To investor advocacy groups, having Pitt as SEC chief was like putting Osama bin Laden in charge of Homeland Security.

Or like inviting Pakistan to help investigate the Mumbai terrorist attacks -Lee