Mary Jo White, the chair of the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) is characterized by friends and colleagues as the most competitive and driven person they have ever encountered.
Today, she blizzards her staff and friends with emails at all hours. She has had the same cohort of intimate friends since the seventies. She and her husband, John White, have a tennis court at their country house in Upstate New York where her style of play led her friends to give her the nickname Sid Vicious. Although she is a sports fan and often invites people to join her at games, she doesn't carry on conversations while the ball is live. White's life is about working, and winning.
As the country sank into a severe recession, many wondered why the major figures in the financial world, whose firms had recieved billions of taxpayer dollars at the height of the crisis, weren't being punished for their misdeeds. Because the SEC is an enforcement agency, it became the focus of the frustration.
Mary Jo White took over at the SEC more than four years after the panic of the financial crisis, and just a few months before the end of the five-year statue of limitations on the misdeeds leading up to the crisis. White says, "The SEC's mission is tripartite: protect investors, facilitate capital formation, and insure the fairness and integrity of the marketplace."
White is the first career prosecutor and litigator to chair the SEC. She filled the top jobs in the enforcement division right away, with people she knew well. In a statement that White released to accompany her confirmation hearing, she mentioned three "early priorities" at the SEC. One was to determine the best way to regulate high-frequency trading. The second was to engage in "bold and unrelenting" enforcement. The third was to produce rules for quickly implementing the JOBS Act and Dodd-Frank.
Mary Jo White and her lieutenants project confidence that the SEC and the financial industry can march forward together into a secure and prosperous future. However, the proof of the pudding is in the eating.
Source: The New Yorker, November 11, 2013.