In one of her first actions as SEC chairman, Mary Schapiro announced today that she was getting rid of a policy that required SEC officials to get approval from the commissioners before negotiating corporate penalties. According to the Associated Press, “Schapiro said that practice ‘just sends the wrong message.’”

But Schapiro should perhaps focus a little less on message and a little more on an action’s consequences for investors the SEC is supposed to protect. Because unfortunately, this change will have…

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When news broke of Bernard Madoff’s alleged $50 billion worldwide Ponzi scheme, news accounts first protrayed him as a shadowy hedge fund manager outside the scope of regulation by the Securities and Exchange Commission. But as the sheer magnitude of the fraud became clearer, so did the picture of Madoff’s place in the Wall Street-Washington world.

Madoff’s businesses were actually subject to a variety of financial regulations, something Madoff would actually use as a selling point to investors. Last year in…

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President-Elect Barack Obama just nominated former Senate Democratic Leader Tom to be his Secretary of Health and Human Services. Much is being written about Daschle being a Washington insider, which he certainly is, but after leaving the Senate after his defeat in 2004, Daschle has commendably taken on the Beltway conventional wisdom on an important issue: The Sarbanes-Oxley accounting mandates.

In late 2005, Daschle became one of the first Democrats to criticize the 2002 law, rushed through Congress in the wake…

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The bailout bill that passed through Congress today seeks to solve the financial mess by massively increasing government involvement in private finance. But more Government cannot be the answer to a government-created problem. The fact is that short-sighted government policies distorted the market in the first place. Bankers were certainly to blame for responding to these signals from government in the hope of a quick buck, but at its base, much of the problem was caused by government.

These are the…

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It’s been called a ticking time bomb by Investor’s Business Daily. CNNMoney asks if this will be the next disaster. Yet the Feds are delaying one key in bringing stability to our financial markets.

As a $62 trillion dollar over the counter market, CDSs need an exchange or central clearinghouse to provide transparency and collateral requirements. CME (formed from the Chicago Board of Trade and the Chicago Mercantile Exchange) and the Clearing Corp (formed from 17 financial players including UBS and Goldman…

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At the peak of the real estate boom, there was one group of individuals who said the bubble was about to pop. They pointed to overvalued land and bad underwriting of loans. And they bet their own money on their beliefs. Who are these unsung prophets of the subprime bust: the much-maligned short-sellers, whom both Britain, as Iain Murray reported yesterday, and now the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission temporarily want to ban in an effort to keep the share price…

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