September 12, 2013.

Wall Street's Top Cop: SEC Tries to Rebuild It's Reputation

After the darkness the feeble light of the paraffin lamp had seemed very bright. For the first time he could see the woman properly. He had taken a step towards her and then halted, full of lust and terror. He was painfully conscious of the risk he had taken in coming here. It was perfectly possible that the patrols would catch him on the way out: for that matter they might be waiting outside the door at this moment. If he went away without even doing what he had come here to do----!

The Securities and Exchange Commission is ending its push to punish financial-crisis misconduct in the same way it started----with a new chairman vowing that Wall Street's top cop will be tougher in the future.

It had got to be written down, it had got to be confessed. What he had suddenly seen in the lamplight was that the woman was old. The paint was plastered so thick on her face that it looked as though it might crack like a cardboard mask. There were streaks of white in her hair; but the truly dreadful detail was that her mouth had fallen a little open, revealing nothing except a cavernous blackness. She had no teeth at all.

In 2009, at the depths of the recession, Mary Schapiro took the reins at the SEC promising to "move aggressively to reinvigorate enforcement" at the agency. She created teams to target various types of alleged misconduct, including one focused on the complicated mortgage bonds that helped set off a global financial panic.

He wrote hurriedly, in scrabbling handwriting:

The agency has filed civil charges against 138 firms and individuals for alleged misconduct just before or during the crisis, according to an analysis by The Wall Street Journal. And it received $2.7 billion in fines, repayment of ill-gotten gains and other penalties. But some of the SEC's highest-profile probes of top Wall Street executives have stalled and are being dropped.