We’ve been poring over the report — hit piece? — on the SEC issued today by the Government Accountability Office, and we’re starting to understand why Hank Paulson wanted to shut the place down and put all those “enforcers” out of their Kafkaesque misery. The agency got more tips from FINRA — the financial industry’s self-regulator — than it had the resources to pursue, it lost 11.5% of its lawyers since 2004, and the staff lacked in-house expertise on pretty much all the fancy financial instruments without which we would not have this crisis (in addition to “government securities” which seems a bit sad, the SEC being a division of the government). The agency’s revenues were in a downward spiral, with corporate penalties falling 39% in fiscal year 2006, only to fall another 48% in 2007, only to fall another 49% last year.
This is a companion discussion topic for the original entry at https://talkingpointsmemo.com/?p=143021