The Regulatory Revolving Door
- September 02
- D&S BLOG
This is what Yves Smith said about this Counterpunch article:
A reader who has first hand knowledge of some of the major US financial regulators flagged a CounterPunch article by Pam Martens as the best discussion of the “revolving door” problem that he had ever seen.
The interesting thing about this article is that it highlights a problem that is not widely recognized and therefore has no safeguards against it.
The problem is, to wit
The most important aspect of this is that the “revolving door” problem is most acute, not with the actual regulated firms, but with the professional firms that provide services to regulated entities, especially law firms (it is also a serious issue with compliance consulting firms, although that is something of a separate issue.)
One reason for that is that the standards are different for lawyers than for financial professionals. Financial professionals are forbidden from joining any company they have recently examined; but lawyers are forbidden only from working on cases they have had contact with–there are no specific prohibitions on working for law firms that have cases that they have had contact with, as long as they don’t work on those cases (as if that could ever be enforced.)
That means that lawyers like Linda Thomsen, who as head of Enforcement would have been familiar with every case of significance, could go directly to work for a securities law firm already handling cases which she would most certainly have been familiar with, without Ethics making so much as a peep. I don’t know how that can be seen as anything other than a serious conflict of interest.
Will the IG Report Cover the Role of White Shoe Law Firms? Madoff and the SEC’s Revolving Door
By PAM MARTENS
CounterpunchThe long-awaited investigative report by the Securities and Exchange Commission’s (SEC) Inspector General on how the SEC bungled multiple investigations of Bernard Madoff is set for release this week. Unfortunately, according to media reports, the long suffering investing public will not receive the report until the SEC itself has had a chance to review it.
The team that produced this report on one of the most long-running and convoluted frauds in the history of Wall Street included Inspector General H. David Kotz who came to the SEC-IG post in December 2007 after five years as Inspector General and Associate General Counsel for the Peace Corps. The Deputy Inspector General, Noelle Frangipane, also came to the SEC from the Peace Corps where she had served as Director of Policy and Public Information.
This lack of Wall Street cronyism by the top two in the Inspector General’s office might have been refreshing to some in Congress and compensated for their not knowing the difference between puts and calls and peaks and troughs and the intricacies of Mr. Madoff’s split-strike conversion strategy (he splits with your money while converting you to a pauper). But the background of the member of the team heading up the Inspector General’s Office of Investigations, J. David Fielder, should have rang serious alarm bells to Congressional investigators.
For the ten years leading up to July 2007, J. David Fielder worked for the SEC as a Senior Counsel in the Division of Enforcement. In February 1999, he moved to the Division of Investment Management, first as Senior Counsel on the Task Force for Adviser Regulation, then as Advisor to the Director. In November 2000, SEC Chairman, Arthur Levitt, appointed Fielder Counsel to the Chairman.
