Bush rule required SEC enforcement lawyers to get the OK from commissioners before moving on cases

[Kolesar]

This is an excerpt from an interesting recount of the financial disaster that is being posted at www.slate.com

http://www.slate.com/id/2212480/entry/2212637/

There were two kinds of governmental failure in the past several decades: One was active financial deregulation; the other was the purposeful malignant neglect of government's regulatory role in
overseeing the markets. Regulators were defanged.

I'll mention just two examples. The first is when Alan Greenspan, the chairman of the Fed, blocked Fed Gov. Ed Gramlich's efforts to have the chief banking regulatory arm of the country take a more active role in subprime lending. The second is the SEC's decision, which Obama's new chairman, Mary Schapiro, is repealing, to require enforcement lawyers to get the OK from commissioners before moving on cases: This was an intentional roadblock to securities enforcement erected by ideologues and cronies in the Bush administration. After all, the first SEC chairman appointed by Bush was Harvey Pitt, a lawyer who had a long career defending companies from accusations by the SEC.