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Comment by omarchowdhury | Hacker News Reader

You don't know the inner workings of the street, so why do you think it's fair for you to say the SEC is doing a terrible job reining in the financial sector?

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Because things like the financial crisis of 2008 happened? Because as far as I know the SEC hasn't introduced any sort of uniform fiduciary standard for financial advisors? While I don't know the inner workings of the street, everything I see seems to point to the SEC not doing enough to penalized well-established players, and is allowing a culture in which firms do their best to not get cauhgt/apologize for transgressions rather than follow the law. Maybe it's just that my news sources are biased, but I try and vary them and pick generally considered good publications (when it's written form at least).

It seems objectively difficult to find anyone that's going to say the SEC is doing a great job at reining in the financial sector -- so my question stands, why are they doing such a good job at reining in ICOs, using tech that's barely understood by the general populace (though it's probably easy to spot how scummy they are), and in an absolutely new regulatory landscape?

Can you accurately and properly trace the blame for the financial crisis of 2008 onto the failings of the SEC?

Three recent and well known high-profile failures at the SEC and books or articles covering them:

0. Enron - Senate committee concludes Enron was enabled by a systemic and catastrophic failure at the SEC[0]. Smartest Guys in the Room[1] is one of the better books about it

1. No One Would Listen - book from Madoff whistleblower Harry Markopolos[2]. He spent years laying out the entire Madoff case for the SEC yet their investigators kept signing off on Madoff. He has a lot of good detail on why the SEC are a bad regulator.

2. Financial Crisis - SEC chairman concedes the oversight program was fatally flawed in monitoring Bear Sterns and other hedge funds[3] - plenty of books on crisis, "After the Music Stopped" was good[4]

[0] https://www.wsj.com/articles/SB1033944629262271233

[1] https://www.amazon.com/Smartest-Guys-Room-Amazing-Scandalous...

[2] https://www.amazon.com/No-One-Would-Listen-Financial/dp/0470...

[3] http://www.nytimes.com/2008/09/27/business/27sec.html?mcubz=...

[4] https://www.amazon.com/After-Music-Stopped-Financial-Respons...

Can you accurately and properly trace the blame for any large scale malfunction of society on one small bureaucratic group?

Even if you pin the blame on bad actors that took control of ratings bodies and propogated bad CDOs, are you suggesting that the SEC was blameless? Would you not say it's within the purview of the SEC to manage/monitor/influence CDO product selling/purchasing?

History demonstrates that government regulations have never prevented every financial crisis.

That's because if they did you wouldn't know it. If a certain regulation prevented a certain action that would have caused a recession, you would never know it helped.

I hear you, but I don't think it's relevant to OP.

I'm not arguing that some regulations aren't beneficial. Only pointing out that it's tough to argue, using history, "we had a crash because not enough regulation!!!"

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