New chief appointed at SEC

WASHINGTON – The leadership of the Securities and Exchange Commission will change next month. Its approach to regulation probably won’t.

Mary Schapiro will step down as chairwoman after a tumultuous tenure in which she helped lead the government’s regulatory response to the 2008 financial crisis.

Replacing her will be Elisse Walter, one of five SEC commissioners, whose career path has tracked Schapiro’s for nearly three decades.

Walter has served under Schapiro at both the SEC and the Financial Industry Regulatory Authority, the securities industry’s self-policing organization. Both women worked at the SEC in the 1980s. Walter was also general counsel of the Commodity Futures Trading Commission when Schapiro led that agency in the mid-1990s.

She’s expected to follow the approach Schapiro took at the SEC over nearly four years.

President Barack Obama on Monday announced his choice of Walter, who will take over at a critical time for the SEC, which is seeking stricter rules for money-market mutual funds and must get into shape the so-called Volcker Rule, which would bar banks from making certain trades for their own profit.

The agency is also pursuing enforcement actions against banks over their sales of risky mortgage securities before the housing bust.

Obama can fill the SEC chairman’s job without Senate approval because Walter has already been confirmed through 2013. That means Obama can avoid a potential confirmation fight until after the White House and Congress address the package of tax increases and spending cuts set to kick in next year.

The president will need to nominate a permanent successor before Walter’s term ends in December 2013.

At FINRA, Walter was Schapiro’s “right-hand person,” said James Cox, a Duke University law professor and expert on securities law. As an SEC commissioner, Walter consistently voted with Schapiro on rule-making and other initiatives.

Cox said he wasn’t surprised that both of Obama’s choices to lead the SEC have come from an industry self-regulatory organization. The Obama administration “is not an eager regulator of the securities markets,” he said.

Walter, a 62-year-old Democrat, was appointed to the SEC in 2008 by President George W. Bush. Earlier, she was a senior official at FINRA, which Schapiro led before becoming SEC chairman in January 2009.

Schapiro’s challenges have probably been the most difficult any SEC chairman has faced, said John Coffee, a professor of securities law at Columbia University. She took office after the financial crisis and the Bernard Madoff Ponzi scheme had eroded public and congressional confidence in the SEC. Since then, the agency has struggled with budgetary shortfalls.

“The Madoff scandal made Congress reluctant to fully fund the agency,” Coffee said.

Schapiro “has to be commended for working incredibly hard and against high odds” to maintain the agency’s budget, Coffee added. Still, the agency is “underfunded and overworked, and that’s not about to change.”

Schapiro will leave the SEC on Dec. 14. She was appointed by Obama in the midst of the worst financial crisis since the Great Depression and is credited with helping reshape the SEC after it was accused of failing to detect reckless investments by many of Wall Street’s largest financial institutions. She also led an agency that brought civil charges against the nation’s largest banks.

In a statement Monday, Obama said “The SEC is stronger and our financial system is safer and better able to serve the American people – thanks in large part to Mary’s hard work.”

But critics argued that Schapiro, 57, failed to act aggressively to charge leading bankers who may have contributed to the crisis. And consumer advocates questioned her appointment because she had led FINRA.