Back to the Future; another Obama pick from the Reagan era.
Mary Schapiro was appointed to the SEC before, so this isnt a new party for her. she has a long resume in financial regulation- she was appointed by Reagan in 88 as the commissioner of the SEC, in 89 she was reappointed by Bush I, and in 94 Clinton switched her to the Commodity Futures Trading Commission [[a sister regulatory agency to the SEC, where it handles the s&p instead of the stock market].
here is where her career took a slightly different turn- she left governmental regulation and went into the ‘for profit’ regulatory field– there is a company which regulates the stock market, and the companies pay them to act a fair arbitrage. now, in a wild opinion, i would guess that this organization operates in a similar fashion to the ’security’ at private universities; the college doesnt want to report its drug abuses, sexual attacks, etc. because it adds negative statistics and bad press, so instead of using real police, they operate with ‘campus security’ so that the school can just expel you and not have to report the incidents. so, after 8 years in governmental regulation, she moved into the rent-a-cop arena.
just to round out her resume, she was one of the 19 people chosen by bush II to sit on his ‘financial literacy council’.
so, if our overall public complaint is that the last 20 years of lax regulation has led us into uncharted and perilous waters, and the precipice of danger lies open before us …. THEN WHY ARE WE APPOINTING THE PEOPLE WHO BUILT THIS SYSTEM. if she was going to regulate what was happening with any kind of success, don’t you think the last 20 years would look different?
i was hesitant to even talk about this, because those of us which are critical of obama’s choices thus far are starting to sound like a broken record- ‘blah blah, obama chose another clinton/bush/reagan era economist to head/chair/advise, this isnt change blah’ — but i feel the need to keep on and point these facts out. he hasn’t appointed a single consumer advocate, labor activist, ‘developmentalist’ economist …. nothing. just more and more members of the same ideological community which got us here.