annette nazareth

Discussion of this nomination can be found on the talk page. (January 2009)

Annette LaPorte Nazareth served as Commissioner of the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission from August 4, 2005 to January 31, 2008. As a Commissioner, Nazareth worked on numerous groundbreaking initiatives, including execution quality disclosure rules, implementation of equities decimal pricing, short sale reforms, implementation of a voluntary regime for consolidated supervision of broker-dealer holding companies and modernization of the national market system rules. Nazareth also served as the Commission’s representative on the Financial Stability Forum from 1999 to 2008.[1]

According to the SEC, "Ms. Nazareth also championed the introduction of prudential regulatory principles to the Commission’s work under the Consolidated Supervised Entity program, a voluntary supervisory regime for the nation’s largest investment bank holding companies." [2]

Following the collapse of Lehman Brothers, the sale of Bear Stearns and Merrill Lynch to bank holding companies, and the conversion of Morgan Stanley and Goldman Sachs into bank holding companies, the CSE program was left without participating investment bank holding companies. As a result, SEC Chairman Christopher Cox in September 2008 announced a decision by the Commission to end the CSE program. The Commission's official press release stated:

"The last six months have made it abundantly clear that voluntary regulation does not work. When Congress passed the Gramm-Leach-Bliley Act, it created a significant regulatory gap by failing to give to the SEC or any agency the authority to regulate large investment bank holding companies, like Goldman Sachs, Morgan Stanley, Merrill Lynch, Lehman Brothers, and Bear Stearns." [3]

Cox took care not to attribute the demise of Bear Stearns to the CSE program, however. In a March 20, 2008 letter to the Chairman of the Basel Committee on Banking Supervision, Cox stated: "As you will see, the conclusion to which these data point is that the fate of Bear Stearns was the result of a lack of confidence, not a lack of capital. When the tumult began last week, and at all times until its agreement to be acquired by JP Morgan Chase during the weekend, the firm had a capital cushion well above what is required to meet supervisory standards calculated using the Basel II standard."[4]

Born on January 27, 1956 in Providence, Rhode Island, she received her J.D. from Columbia Law School, where she was a Harlan Fiske Stone Scholar. She received her A.B., magna cum laude and Phi Beta Kappa, from Brown University in 1978.

Prior to serving as Commissioner, she served as SEC Director of the Division of Market Regulation from March 1999 to August 2005. As Director, she had primary responsibility for the supervision and regulation of the U.S. securities markets. She joined the Commission in 1998