Legal News

Will Mary Schapiro Lead a Merger of the SEC and CFTC?

By Dan Slater

With startling revelations (yesterday and today) that the Bernie Madoff debacle might be owed partly to poor SEC oversight, it was tempting to view the news as perhaps the crowning failure of a long-embattled commission, which also faced criticism recently for its lax oversight of Wall Street banks, such as Bear Stearns and Lehman Bros.

Today, President-elect Obama is scheduled to announce that 53-year-old Mary Schapiro (pictured) will take the reins from current SEC Chairman Chris Cox, who took the job over from William Donaldson a little more than three years ago. Schapiro (Franklin & Marshal College, George Washington U. Law) is the CEO of the Financial Industry Regulatory Authority, the largest non-governmental regulator for all securities firms doing business with the U.S. public, and has been credited with beefing up enforcement while at the National Association of Securities Dealers. (Here are reports on Schapiro’s expected appointment from the WSJ and the NYT.)

But the most notable bullet-point on Schapiro’s resume might be her stint as the chair of the Commodities Futures Trading Commission during the Clinton administration. Why? Well, back in March, we noted Treasury Secretary Hank Paulson’s sweeping plan to reorganize the patchwork of U.S. financial regulation, which contained a recommendation for merging the SEC, which was created in 1934 to re-establish public trust in the post-Depression markets, with the CFTC, created in 1974 to regulate commodities futures and options markets. Schapiro’s service on both commissions (she’s a former SEC commissioner) suggests to some that Obama may have similar designs for 2009.

Advocates of a SEC-CFTC merger argue that the fact that the two commissions have overlapping jurisdictions has led the regulators to court the regulated. Hal S. Scott, a prof of international financial systems at Harvard, told the Journal earlier this year that, “It’s not a good idea to have people competing with each other, particularly if they’re competing in laxity.”

Full post as published by Law Blog - WSJ.com on December 18, 2008 (boomark / email).