SEC

A House Oversight and Government Reform hearing on the controversial merger between Bank of America and Merrill Lynch has been postponed “due to additional documents recently received,” the panel announced today.
The hearing, initially to be held Thursday, has not been rescheduled.

The papers yesterday screamed the news as the two stories broke almost simultaneously. In one plot, the internal watchdog at the Securities and Exchange Commission found that SEC regulators had bungled numerous opportunities to catch Bernie Madoff as he engineered what became a $65 billion Ponzi scheme, leaving Madoff himself to wonder how in [...]

With disgraced Ponzi schemer Bernard Madoff safely behind bars to serve his 150- year prison sentence, the business of figuring out how he pulled off one of the greatest financial swindles of all time is in full swing. The Washington Post looks at three new books out on Madoff, none of which seem to offer [...]

Public protections against fraud hang in the balance over the upcoming SEC budget battle.

The Obama administration is considering stripping the Securities and Exchange Commission of some its oversight powers, and shifting that responsibility to the Federal Reserve, Bloomberg reports.
The proposal, still being drafted, is likely to give the Federal Reserve more authority to supervise financial firms deemed too big to fail. The Fed may inherit some SEC functions, [...]

The investigation into disgraced financier Bernard Madoff’s Ponzi scheme is taking a new turn, as the Securities and Exchange Commission begins investigating whether some of Madoff’s biggest “victims” actually were in on the scam, The Wall Street Journal reports.
Some of the victims apparently were able to state the size of the annual returns they wanted [...]

Just reported by The Washington Post: R. Allen Stanford, head of the Houston-based Stanford Financial Group, has been charged by the Securities and Exchange Commission “with fraud in the sale of $8 billion of certificates of deposit, one of the largest alleged financial frauds in U.S. history.”
Yikes!

In the face of the deepening financial crisis and the largest Wall Street swindle in history, President-elect Barack Obama acted swiftly to fill three key economic posts. He announced his appointments at a press conference this morning in Chicago.
“The regulators who were assigned to oversee Wall Street dropped the ball” in this economic downturn and [...]

Franklin Roosevelt knew the Great Depression offered an opportunity to do more than rescue a sick economy. It was a unique chance to pursue a higher purpose for government — to make life less risky for future generations. If Roosevelt is the standard, Obama will be judged not just on how he deals with the economic crisis, but on how he uses it.

Some experts and politicians believe that the mark-to-market accounting rule is to blame for the financial crisis–and they want to modify it; opponents say that would cloud companies’ true financial health.