US Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) Chairwoman, Mary Schapiro, will step down next month after a tumultuous four years spent rehabilitating the agency’s battered reputation, handing the reins temporarily to a close ally.
SEC Commissioner Elisse Walter, a career regulator who has sided with Schapiro on most of the critical issues before the agency, was named chairman-designate and could serve until December next year, buying time for US President Barack Obama to win Senate approval for a long-term replacement.
Obama plans to nominate someone soon, a White House official said. Walter is among the candidates likely to be considered, as is Treasury official Mary Miller, who spent nearly three decades at T. Rowe Price and has been outspoken about the need to make money markets safer for investors.
The new SEC chair will need to finish Schapiro’s task of resurrecting the agency’s reputation, which was badly tarnished by the 2007-2009 financial crisis.
The SEC is considering money market reforms, additional market structure safeguards, and still needs to write a number of major rules dictated by the 2010 Dodd-Frank financial reform law, including a final version of the Volcker rule to ban banks from trading for their own accounts.
“Elisse has been viewed as being in tune with Mary Schapiro’s agenda,” said Barry Barbash, a former director of the SEC’s division of investment management, now an asset management lawyer at Willkie Farr & Gallagher LLP in Washington. “If the idea is to keep the SEC running the way it’s been running with the same policies, Elisse would seem an appropriate choice.”
Speculation has swirled for months that Schapiro would leave soon after the Nov. 6 presidential election.
Her departure leaves the commission split 2-2 between Democrats and Republicans, which could make it harder for the commission to come to agreement. Obama could move to appoint a fifth commissioner before naming a new chairman.
When Schapiro took over in 2009, the agency was under heavy fire for regulatory blind spots that critics said helped fuel the crisis. It was also lambasted for failing to catch now-convicted Ponzi schemer Bernard Madoff, whose fraud cost investors an estimated US$65 billion.
In addition to shoring up the agency’s name, Schapiro had to fight numerous other fires — from the 2010 “flash crash” that sent the Dow Jones industrial average tumbling 700 points within minutes to high-profile court losses.
“We’ve gotten a lot done, I’m really proud of where the agency is today, so it seemed like a good time,” Schapiro said in an interview on Monday after announcing her departure.
Other possible replacements for Schapiro include Sallie Krawcheck, a former top executive at Bank of America and Citigroup, and Richard Ketchum, chairman of FINRA, Wall Street’s self-funded regulator. SEC enforcement director Robert Khuzami, a Republican, is considered a long shot.
While Walter is also a possibility, she has already been at the SEC for more than four years and served as acting chairman before Schapiro’s confirmation.
In many ways, Walter and Schapiro have been joined at the hip in their career experience and orientations. They both spent years as attorneys at the Commodity Futures Trading Commission and at the SEC, with stints in top positions at FINRA.
“She is a strong advocate of disclosure, of regulation and of consumer protection,” former SEC Commissioner Edward Fleischman said of Walter.
Schapiro’s time at the SEC was marked by some controversy and her departure leaves uncertainty around major initiatives. However, former SEC officials said Schapiro helped revive a moribund agency.
“I think she saved the SEC, which was close to extinction when she took over,” former SEC chairman Arthur Levitt said.
Schapiro said in the interview that steering the agency out of that period in its history was one of the highlights of her tenure there.
She streamlined the SEC enforcement process, hired new types of employees and created a new tips database and a whistleblower office. In the past two years, the agency logged a record number of enforcement actions and brought major financial crisis cases, including a record US$550 million settlement in 2010 with Goldman Sachs.
Taiwan Transport and Storage Corp (TTS, 台灣通運倉儲) yesterday unveiled its first electric tractor unit — manufactured by Volvo Trucks — in a ceremony in Taipei, and said the unit would soon be used to transport cement produced by Taiwan Cement Corp (TCC, 台灣水泥). Both TTS and TCC belong to TCC International Holdings Ltd (台泥國際集團). With the electric tractor unit, the Taipei-based cement firm would become the first in Taiwan to use electric vehicles to transport construction materials. TTS chairman Koo Kung-yi (辜公怡), Volvo Trucks vice president of sales and marketing Johan Selven, TCC president Roman Cheng (程耀輝) and Taikoo Motors Group
Among the rows of vibrators, rubber torsos and leather harnesses at a Chinese sex toys exhibition in Shanghai this weekend, the beginnings of an artificial intelligence (AI)-driven shift in the industry quietly pulsed. China manufactures about 70 percent of the world’s sex toys, most of it the “hardware” on display at the fair — whether that be technicolor tentacled dildos or hyper-realistic personalized silicone dolls. Yet smart toys have been rising in popularity for some time. Many major European and US brands already offer tech-enhanced products that can enable long-distance love, monitor well-being and even bring people one step closer to
RECORD-BREAKING: TSMC’s net profit last quarter beat market expectations by expanding 8.9% and it was the best first-quarter profit in the chipmaker’s history Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Co (TSMC, 台積電), which counts Nvidia Corp as a key customer, yesterday said that artificial intelligence (AI) server chip revenue is set to more than double this year from last year amid rising demand. The chipmaker expects the growth momentum to continue in the next five years with an annual compound growth rate of 50 percent, TSMC chief executive officer C.C. Wei (魏哲家) told investors yesterday. By 2028, AI chips’ contribution to revenue would climb to about 20 percent from a percentage in the low teens, Wei said. “Almost all the AI innovators are working with TSMC to address the
Malaysia’s leader yesterday announced plans to build a massive semiconductor design park, aiming to boost the Southeast Asian nation’s role in the global chip industry. A prominent player in the semiconductor industry for decades, Malaysia accounts for an estimated 13 percent of global back-end manufacturing, according to German tech giant Bosch. Now it wants to go beyond production and emerge as a chip design powerhouse too, Malaysian Prime Minister Anwar Ibrahim said. “I am pleased to announce the largest IC (integrated circuit) Design Park in Southeast Asia, that will house world-class anchor tenants and collaborate with global companies such as Arm [Holdings PLC],”