Where should the SEC focus its investigative resources?
I’d say the entire over-the-counter derivatives market. That’s where the cockroaches go to play on Wall Street — to structured products (financially engineered security/derivatives). It’s the 99% of the structured products that are bad that give the good 1% a bad name. You mentioned that you would hold the heads of federal regulatory agencies criminally responsible for their misconduct. That sounds pretty harsh. Do you really think Federal Reserve Chairman Ben Bernanke, former Fed chairman Alan Greenspan, and former SEC chairman Christopher Cox should go to jail? Yes. They were regulators who failed to regulate. They made sure that their agencies were toothless and blind and mute. Of course, you can’t prosecute them after-the-fact, but going forward, I think they need to change the laws and they need to make the agency heads responsible for enforcing the nation’s laws and having competent staffs. How is your fraud-fighting business going? You must have had some lean years pre-Madoff.
