Saturday, December 20, 2008

FINRA, Madoff, and Obama's SEC choice

"Mary Schapiro, Barack Obama's choice to lead the Securities and Exchange Commission, previously appointed one of Bernard Madoff's sons to a regulatory body that oversees US securities firms.

It has emerged that in 2001, Ms Schapiro, now the chief executive of the Financial Industry Regulatory Authority (FINRA), employed Mark Madoff to serve on the board of the National Adjudicatory Council - the division that reviews disciplinary decisions made by FINRA.

Last week, Mark and his brother, Andrew, were understood to have approached the authorities after their father apparently confessed to orchestrating a $US50 billion ($70.9 billion) securities fraud.

Bernard Madoff is under house arrest in his $US7 million Manhattan apartment and will be electronically tagged after he failed to secure further signatories to guarantee his $US10 million bail.

Both sons have emphatically denied any involvement in what could be the biggest fraud perpetrated by an individual.

However, the link with Mark may prove controversial for Ms Schapiro and the US president-elect, who has moved fast to replace Christopher Cox, the current head of the SEC.

The watchdog has already come under fire for failing to detect Mr Madoff's activities." Story link here, here, here, here and here.

In my opinion, her useless, ineffective term with FINRA who couldn't catch a thief if they stumbled over him unconscious, is a far more damning recommendation than her appointment of Madoff the Lesser. Makes no difference if she was in like flinn with Reagan and Bush and Clinton. She's much too tainted. FINRA and SEC both have to clean up the family tree and get rid of the incest.

Let's see. Obama's got a Secretary of State with huge financial obligations to the Saudis through her husband's library and foundation. He's got a Chief of Staff with fingerprints all over the Blagojevich appointment scandal. He's got a Secretary of Education that helped Bill Ayers with the Annenberg connection in the failing Chicago schools. Those three he knew about. This one probably caught him off guard. Gary Gensler who spent 18 years at Goldman Sachs, the ones who got a jump start on the bail outs in 2007, was under something in Treasury, he appointed to head Commodities Futures Trading Commission.

Sure is lots of hope and change coming our way folks.

4 comments:

Anonymous said...

Does Accuracy In Media plan on issuing an apology to Raymond Bonner and the survivors of the El Mozote massacre any time soon?

http://remindaim.pbwiki.com

Norma said...

Interesting wiki.

Anonymous said...

Subsequent to his time at the Treasury Gensler acted as a Senior Advisor to Senator Paul Sarbanes, one of the authors of legislation that eventually became the Sarbanes-Oxley Act, designed to bring greater oversight to the accounting industry and reform of corporate governance.

Gensler is the co-author of a book (with Greg Baer), The Great Mutual Fund Trap. The thrust of the book is that active trading and investing is an inefficient strategy for individual investors, and that individuals should stick with index and exchange traded funds.

Coincidentally, Gensler has a twin brother Robert Gensler who runs an actively-managed fund for T. Rowe Price. From Answers.com

Norma said...

Sarbox enacted in 2002 was to increase corporate disclosures, tighten internal controls and expand investor protections after the collapses of Enron, Tyco, WorldCom, etc. And Gensler worked on that? Wonder if he considers it a success with all that's happened in the past 18 mo. Well, if a lot of regulation doesn't work, let's apply more.