Going Public: My Adventures Inside the SEC and How to Prevent the Next Devastating Crisis

CHAPTER4

POSTCRASH TRIAGE IN THE SEC EMERGENCY ROOM

Triage: the assignment of degrees of urgency to wounds in order to decide the order of treatment of a large number of patients or casualties.

—Jeff Solheim, Emergency Nursing

Some days during my first years at the SEC (I ended up staying for five years), I felt like a trauma surgeon in the ER of the financial sector. In the wake of the financial train wreck of 2008 and the early casualties from the Madoff and Stanford scandals, patients kept getting wheeled through the doors of the SEC, and I was racing from table to table operating on the toughest cases. And while we juggled many priorities, we simply had to save as many investors as we could. The truth was, after decades of the SEC’s more ...