Recent Blog Posts
-
The Year in Research
Dec 31 20089:13 am EDT -
Mind Your Value Judgements
Dec 19 20087:52 pm EDT -
S.E.C. Short-Sale Ban: Pretty Much Useless
Dec 19 20083:45 pm EDT -
Advice from Japan: Don't Forget TARP 1
Dec 19 20082:31 pm EDT -
Chart of the Day: Money Market Stress Easing
Dec 18 20088:57 pm EDT -
House Price Bubble Deflated?
Dec 18 20085:57 pm EDT -
Where Were the Whistleblowers?
Dec 16 200811:03 pm EDT -
It's Just a Recession
Dec 13 200810:20 pm EDT -
Comparing American and European Unemployment Insurance
Dec 12 20087:46 pm EDT -
Back to Normal?
Dec 11 20084:33 pm EDT
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Eliot Spitzer's Stat of the Day
Out of 20 S.E.C. settlements for market timing by mutual funds, 16 involved Spitzer when he was New York's attorney general.
The percentage of illegally-gotten money that mutual funds had to give back in the Spitzer cases was 80 percent -- almost full restitution.
In the 4 settlements not involving Spitzer, the S.E.C. settled for 7 percent.
Why the gap?
Part of it was Spitzer's aggressiveness, but the other factor was that younger S.E.C. officials usually go work at the firms they're in charge of regulating. So, the incentive to bring the hammer is, ummm, somewhat compromised.
From Justin Wolfers:
It seems to me that the truly important violations of the public trust are when the power we give our government officials is sold, rather than what government officials choose to buy. Yet our political scandals are too often dominated by private mistakes, rather than public misdeeds. This is why I'm more worried about what the SEC is selling than what Eliot Spitzer has been buying.
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