Mr. Donaldson clearly angered big business and some in the Republican Party with measures he pushed in his 28-month tenure. They included hefty fines for corporate wrongdoers, more independence for mutual-fund companies' boards, registration of many hedge funds' advisers and a requirement that stock marketplaces always give investors the best possible price.
[...]
In 1995, Rep. Cox sponsored the Private Securities Litigation Reform Act, which restricted the ability of investors to sue for securities fraud. It became law despite a veto by President Clinton, which was overridden. During his tenure in Congress, Rep. Cox has served on numerous committees that have had oversight of the SEC.
SEC critics are clearly relishing the chance to replace Mr. Donaldson with someone less regulation-minded.
If you aren't in favor of "always giving investors the best possible price," as Donaldson was, then you're against it (I'm indulging in a bit of presidential logic here), and therefore also against investors. Alternately, if you're sponsoring legislation that "restricts the ability of investors to sue for securities fraud," then you're clearly in favor of securities fraud, as Cox evidently is.
One of my criticisms of Social Security privatization has been the high fees, which suffer multiple levels of regulatory inattention (at the securities level, at the mutual fund level, at the annuities level, and so on), inattention that Donaldson tried unsuccessfully to address. The fees will eat the returns out of your accounts, enough to create substantially lower standards of living for retirees while Wall Street revels in its own calculated (and indeed legislated) inefficiencies.
So now Christopher Cox, congressional promoter of securities fraud, will head the SEC. He certainly fits the donor-beholden criminal pattern of the Bush administration much better than Donaldson did.
