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?
Only a Trillion Dollars to late!!