Remember Gary Aguirre? He was the former Securities and Exchange Commission investigator whose explosive charges led to a series of hearings on Capital Hill and a lot of alarm-bell ringing publicity, particularly from Gretchen Morgenson of the New York Times. Aguirre's main charge was that he was fired from the SEC after an investigation into possible insider trading led him toward a top Wall Street executive.
Today the Guardian reminds us that not only is Aguirre still around. So are the problems he became famous exposing:
"What you have at the SEC is people rotating from jobs where you make $180,000 a year into jobs where you make over a million," Aguirre tells the Guardian in an interview, on what he sees as a mutually back-scratching relationship between the regulator and Wall Street. "It's very friendly - it's a club. I'm here, I'm inside, now I'm outside, now I'm inside again.
"When the SEC starts playing favourites and they decide not to go after Wall Street elite and focus on small fry, then they're not focusing on the players that really impact the capital markets. It's not the penny stock dealers that could trigger a credit crisis in this country."
Enforcer who stalked Mack the Knife tells of Wall Street scandal [The Guardian]
Posted by Dave Patch , Feb 27, 2007 6:07PM
From everything I have heard the working level stiff at the SEC either has good intentions but gets snuffed out by teh staff or, they are too stupid to really understand the markets to stop the fraud.
Either way, what the Guardian reported and what Aguirre stated is true, the SEC is a "window dressing" for fraud bought and paid for with US Tax dollars.