Cartoon: Goldman Sachs

Bernie Madoff and the Failure of the SEC

Lawmakers took the Securities and Exchange Commission to task Thursday for failing to prevent Bernard Madoff from perpetrating one of the largest financial frauds in U.S. history.
"Because the SEC failed to do its job, Madoff stole $50 billion," said Sen. Christopher Dodd, D-Conn., chairman of the Senate Banking Committee. "There can be no excuse for that colossal failure."

Dodd's remarks came at the beginning of the committee's second hearing to investigate the SEC's shortcomings in the Madoff case and how to improve the agency's performance in the future.

Madoff, 71, was convicted of operating a Ponzi scheme and defrauding thousands of investors. He pleaded guilty and was sentenced to 150 years in prison in June. Prosecutors have said it was the largest investor fraud ever committed by a single person.

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Cartoon: SEC and Bernie Madoff

Cartoon: SEC and Madoff

Chris Cox: SEC Not To Blame

When the Securities and Exchange Commission was created in 1934, its purpose was to serve as an independent regulator of the unbridled profit-seeking activity of self-interested individuals and firms in the securities markets. It was not intended to supplant the market or directly participate in it. Instead, it marked a deliberate effort to clearly define and separate the role of the national government, on the one hand, and the capital markets, on the other...

Over the years, the agency has acquired three explicit goals: protecting investors; maintaining fair and orderly markets; and promoting capital formation. These three complementary missions are logically consistent with the original premise of the securities laws, which was that government is an auxiliary to the market, not a substitute for it or a participant in it. Virtually every aspect of the 1933 and 1934 Acts, and the regulations implementing them, follows from the notion that markets should be efficient, competitive, transparent and free of fraud...

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Barry Ritholtz remind us that Cox dropped the ball as well.

You will note that nowhere in his entire Op-Ed is there any mention of the role of the SEC in the entire credit or financial mess — most notably, the SEC’s nonfeasance. They utterly failed to discharge their legal responsibility to regulate the Rating Agencies (Moody’s, S&P, Fitch). Note that these same agencies are the ones that slapped triple AAA rating ont he mortgage backed paper at the root of the current crisis.

Nor does he address the role of the SEC in allowing the 5 biggest investment banks — now wards of the state — to waive net cap rules and lever up to 40-to-1.

Cox takes zero personal responsibility for the current crisis for the acts of his own agency, or even himself.

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