The US Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) was reeling in the wake of harsh but justified criticism for failing to predict, control or even contain the global financial crisis.
Under its watch, fraudster Bernard Madoff managed to ¬operate the largest Ponzi scheme in history and Wall Street stalwart Lehman Brothers collapsed, taking billions of dollars, business confidence and reputations down with it.
It was a heady time with traders investing in schemes they, let alone the regulators, didn’t understand and whose behaviour they couldn’t predict. Related: SEC skirmishes over standards The SEC, along with many of the world’s financial regulators, was starkly exposed as ill-equipped to deal with the chaos erupting across the globe.
The US Government snapped into crisis mode and took the extraordinary move of handing the ¬financial sector a multibillion-dollar bailout. But still the economy shook.
Enter Mary Schapiro, a career regulator, to rescue a languishing SEC. Her job was to assess what went wrong and to ensure it didn’t happen again. ¬
Schapiro was appointed by US President Barak Obama as the 29th chairman of the SEC and its first female chair – though that fact, she says, got lost in the enormity of the task assigned to her.
“When I joined in June 2009, my thought was of restoring the agency’s vigour and credibility within the financial regulatory community,” Schapiro told INTHEBLACK during a visit to Sydney recently.
“I understood how really critical it was to the success of our economy to have an agency that was high functioning, agile and intelligent, and committed to investor protection and market integrity.
“I think I had about a day as opposed to 100 days,” she says of the much-touted first 100 days used by many executives tasked with turning a flailing company around.
So how does an executive go about picking up the pieces and