Wednesday, January 30, 2013
Hedging Their Bets
As Matt Taibbi writes at Rolling Stone, Obama's choice of Mary Jo White to head the SEC is putting the fox in charge of guarding the hen house. As a Wall Street lawyer who made her millions at a firm defending Morgan Stanley, Bank of America, Goldman Sachs, Chase and AIG, White is about as conflicted in her interests as she can get. As a former U.S. Attorney for the Southern District of New York, White's choice to become a mouthpiece for the criminals she was once supposed to prosecute was irreversible. As Taibbi notes, her pulling strings at the SEC to quash investigations of insider trading by her clients is reason enough to disqualify her from the appointment, but the fact her nest egg is guaranteed by the people she is now supposed to regulate makes it clear the appointment is Wall Street's way of hedging their bets.
