Meet Mary Schapiro, Obama's Horrendous Pick as SEC Chairman

The future SEC chairperson gracing a stock promotion rag

Barack Obama calls his transition website change.gov, and his campaign slogal used "change" about a million times, so I am utterly flummoxed -- and disgusted -- by his selection of Mary Schapiro as SEC chairman, to replace the awful Chris Cox.

What that signals to me is that Obama wants no change at all in the desultory regulatory apparatus that has utterly failed the American people. Either that, or he is a victim of a con job that would do Bernie Madoff proud by his establishmentarian finance advisors.

Schapiro is a career bureaucrat who served on the SEC during the Artie Levitt era, and is now head of FINRA, the big self-non-regulatory apparatus.

To give you an idea of how out to lunch this lady is, she let her puss be plastered on the cover of Equities Magazine last year. As if that's not bad enough, as I pointed out in a blog item at the time, she praised this stock-promotion rag.

The chances of Schapiro shaking things up in the securities industry -- instituting real, meaningful, desperately desired change -- are about the same as the chances you can make a black bear curtsy and serve tea. This is a terribly disappointing selection.

UPDATE: And then there's the Bayou mess, which happened on Schapiro's watch. See Greg Newton's blog, which was all over the story at the time.

© 2008 Gary Weiss. All rights reserved.