Tobin Harshaw
The New York Times
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According to the SEC’s inspector general, 17 “senior-level employees,” some earning as much as $222,418 a year, were caught up in the porn sweep and disciplined. One senior SEC attorney looked at porn eight hours a day, burning the files to CDs and DVDs when he ran out of hard drive space. Another employee used Google to bypass the SEC’s Internet filter and gaze at “very graphic” images.
The revelations—which have been documented on the inspector general’s website since 2008 but drew little notice until last week—are complicating President Obama’s push to strengthen regulation of Wall Street. How can he slap down the bankers knowing that “while they were busy leveraging our entire society,” the SEC’s “A-number-one enforcement team was surfing for smut”?
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Issue of the week: Raising the minimum wagefeature How will raising the federal minimum wage from $7.25 to $9 an hour affect the economy?
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Issue of the week: Breaking up the big banks
feature There’s a growing realization that we need to end the taxpayer guarantees that Dodd-Frank left in place.
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Issue of the week: The death of daily deals?
feature This is a “winter of discontent” for daily deal companies Groupon and LivingSocial.
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Issue of the week: CEOs tackle the deficit
feature America’s top business leaders sent Congress an open letter urging immediate action on the $16 trillion national debt.
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Issue of the week: Does Wall Street need speed limits?
feature High-frequency trading now accounts for as much as 70 percent of market volume.
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Issue of the week: Victory for a bank watchdog
feature A New York state financial regulator accused a London-based bank of laundering $250 billion for Iran.
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Issue of the week: A former megabanker’s conversion
feature Sanford Weill, the architect of the modern megabank, now favors the end of too-big-to-fail banks.
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Issue of the week: Libor scandal rocks banking
feature The interest rate scandal is just beginning and may soon engulf at least a dozen other major banks.