Wealthy Jerks

The damage done by the freewheeling bankers and investors around the world is probably immeasurable. I know I think about the lost value of my retirement savings every time I read about our economic crisis, and I am just a small player in the investment world.

This story in Gawker is just one of the two suicides I've read about following the Madoff scandal...

William Foxton, a 65-year-old retired British military officer, shot himself in the head after losing his life's savings in Madoff's $50 billion moneysuck.

His son Willard told Britain's Sky News that his father was distraught, telling his son "I've lost all the money, I might have to declare myself bankrupt."

Willard added a statement of his own:

"I want Madoff and others involved to know that they have my father's blood on their hands."

Christopher Cox Leaves

I hadn't heard this, but it sure sounds like good news to me...

From The New York Times. Read more by clicking on the link.

Word comes from the Securities and Exchange Commission that Christopher Cox left the chairmanship on Tuesday. There was no announcement, although he had said earlier that he would leave at the end of the Bush administration.

Mr. Cox was brought in by President Bush at a time when Republicans were mad that the previous chairman, William H. Donaldson, was voting with the Democrats on contentious issues. His mandate was to restore unity, and at first he seemed an ideal choice. He had been a securities lawyer, many years earlier, and his tenure as a Republican congressman from California had shown him to be more willing than most to compromise across the aisle.

He was determined to avoid a split commission, with the result that little got done. At the insistence of one Republican commissioner, Paul Atkins, the commission slowed down the enforcement process. Some cases languished for months — even after settlement deals were reached — while the commission pondered whether the companies had agreed to pay penalties that were too high.

Mr. Cox had a politician’s nose for public relations, which did not serve him well as the manager of an overtaxed regulatory agency. When reporters reacted with outrage to receiving subpoenas, he withdrew them in a way that held the staff up to ridicule. Similarly, when the Bernard L. Madoff scandal broke, he issued a statement that seemed to him to be an agency apology, and that seemed inside the agency to be a case of a chairman abandoning the people who worked for him.