SEC Chief Can't Win for Losing

It must be tough to be the head of the SEC, when you know that you'll always be under a microscope - and gun. Business moaned and complained about Sarbanes-Oxley, how regulation would be the death of business on this continent. (Notice how profits are doing pretty well, thank you very much?) Now Christopher Cox is getting pummelled over not having a higher profile during the Bear Stearns financial crisis. Of course, it was the Fed that had to pull the bank out, and Congress that has to deal with how to better regulate the industry (and maybe, who knows?, go back to some of those old deposit requirements that seemed to work so well). I think the problem is that people want someone to blame - anyone. Businesspeople are just regular folk, when you get past the bespoke suits and expense accounts, and they get scared when the entire framework of their world quakes. But I'm not sure there is a happy or short answer. Regulation may work for a while, but will eventually fail as people forget why it was put there in the first place, or someone locates gaps that let them do as they wish. And when things go wrong, we can only blame ourselves. Perhaps a bit less yearning for something from nothing might go a much longer way to sanity.