Posted on 09/18/2008 11:24:53 AM PDT by Free ThinkerNY
Republican presidential candidate John McCain, campaigning in Iowa Thursday, is expected to call for the firing of Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) Chairman Chris Cox.
In his prepared remarks, Sen. McCain (Ariz.), without naming Cox, said the chairman has “betrayed the public’s trust.”
“If I were president today, I would fire him,” McCain will say, according to his prepared remarks.
(Excerpt) Read more at thehill.com ...
Cox was my Congressman. his appointment to the office was a surprise to us all.
While he is at it would he fire the head of DHS for the failure of Border Security?
This is becoming a joke. Everyone has solutions now.
Cox is not the whole problem, but he’s certainly part of the problem.
He has been allowing naked short selling on a massive scale, which is technically illegal but has not been enforced. The SEC just announced that the rule would be reinstated, but that’s locking the stable door . . .
One reason why some of these finance companies have gone bust is that the hedge funds have shorted them into destruction. And one thing leads to another.
Another problem was that, incredibly, the SEC suspended the uptick rule on shorts, which has been in place since the 1987 stock market disaster. Could there have been a worse time to do that than during a potential economic meltdown, when the PPT and the Fed are trying to prop up the market?
Cox was my Congressman as well. In that position, I felt he did a reasonably good job, although I never forgot his siding with Irvine on the conversion of El Toro Marine Air Station to be Orange County’s main airport. What a huge missed opportunity for the future of aviation in Orange County.
As for his stint at the SEC, I believe he has been a total disaster, and at times I questioned his motivations and just whom he was representing. It certainly was not the individual investor. His approval of the elimination of the Uptick rule for Short Selling was a disaster that has come back to haunt us. It allowed for the Shorting of stocks on a massive basis, especially with the nearly total lack of enforcement against those who did so-called Naked Shorting. Quite a few of the companies damaged or destroyed the past few weeks were due to both of these activities.
The simple answer here is to fire the entire SEC. They gave great grades to Enron and various companies that were failing. They gave a great commentary a few weeks ago for the Lehman Brothers organization. I don’t see any reason to have the SEC around....they do little for the nation except write fiction.
Companies fail because of bad business models or poor execution of good business models, not because of short sellers. Short sellers sniff out the bad stuff. The problem for some with price discovery is that they don't like what's discovered. That isn't matter of public policy, it's a matter of psychology.
I had to look up the uptick rule and Naked Shorting.
The SEC eliminated the “Uptick rule” on July 6, 2007. The elimination of the rule was preceded by a SEC order, placed on July 28, 2004, to create a one-year pilot temporarily suspending the uptick rule on select securities.
The purpose of the suspension was so that the commission could study the effectiveness of the rule.
In the United States, naked short selling is covered by various SEC regulations. In 2005, “Regulation SHO” was enacted to curb the practice, requiring that broker-dealers have grounds to believe that shares will be available for a given stock transaction, and requiring that delivery take place within a limited time period.[1][2] As part of its response to the crisis in the North American markets in 2008, the SEC issued a temporary order restricting fails to deliver in the shares of 19 financial firms deemed systemically important.[3] Effective September 18, 2008, following the the largest bankruptcy filing in U.S. history by Lehman Brothers, the SEC expanded the temporary rules to remove exceptions and to cover all companies.
So how come between 2004 and 2007 there were no problems and it just happened this year?
ABC News is claiming the President doesn't have the authority to fire the SEC chair - is that correct?
Yes, the govt. employee payroll is too big, and there are way too many doing way too little. But, I think McCain might be hurting himself a bit. The tough-guy talk about getting rid of people is, perhaps, a bit premature. Maybe better done after the election when McCain is in office? Just MHO
When things go bad everyone is fair game. I do not know Cox or anything about him, but in bad times a “scapegoat” must be found. And if people do not know by now that regulation is seldom very effective then they have been living on another planet or behind the veil of Washington, D.C..
I am a supporter of McCain/Palin but the place to look for scapegoats is in Washington and in particular our Congress. I am disappointed that Senator McCain would go after Cox. In my opinion, it is just political correctness and pandering or both. That does not equate to McCain’s program of change.
Only a Trillion Dollars to late!!
snarky newsreader said that the president cannot fire the chairman of the SEC
Seems to me if the President appoints the chairman he can certainly remove him
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