These last three years on the SEC staff have provided some of the most exciting and rewarding experiences of my professional life. And the last few months were just extraordinary. We have faced some of the most interesting and challenging securities issues of our time.
I want to start by going back to when I was here at this conference two years ago, in January 2007. The single biggest issue facing the Commission at that time was the perceived (or actual) erosion of US markets in favour of international markets. The US was perceived to be losing the global competitive battle – for companies, for markets and for investors – largely because of what was said (at the time) to be the inhospitable and onerous regulatory environment in the US. Three separate studies focused on the Sarbanes-Oxley Act of 2002 (Sox), concluding that over-regulation was causing a mass exodus from...