Mary Schapiro Can Be Easily Out Manuevered by the Big Boys

WSJ is reporting on Barack Obama's choice to head the SEC that:

When President-elect Barack Obama nominated Mary Schapiro to lead the Securities and Exchange Commission, he criticized regulators for having "dropped the ball" in a "failure of oversight" in the markets meltdown and the Bernard Madoff scandal.

But a close examination of Ms. Schapiro's record as a regulator shows she has infrequently pursued tough action against big Wall Street firms.

A regulatory-agency merger that Ms. Schapiro oversaw shifted power to larger financial firms at the expense of small ones. The agency she heads, called the Financial Industry Regulatory Authority, or Finra, missed the mortgage crisis and Bernard Madoff's alleged $50 billion Ponzi scheme...

This backs up our initial take on Schapiro, when we wrote in December, after news leaked that she would be named to head the SEC:

Christopher Cox may in retrospect look like an Aristotelian fountain of wisdom, compared to Obama's choice of Mary Schapiro as the new SEC chairman...Schapiro's philosophy on regulation appears to be that the big boys have different rules that they must play by then up and comers...Somewhere in Manhattan, the insiders are celebrating tonight.