Securities and Exchange Commission Historical Society

Fair To All People: The SEC and the Regulation of Insider Trading

The SEC Takes Command

William Cary and the Special Study

William Cary was a Columbia Law professor and the author of one of the most widely-used law school casebooks on corporations. When he became SEC Chairman, his agenda included overturning the Massachusetts Supreme Court's decision in Goodwin v. Agassiz, which held that insider trading was not actionable as common law fraud in open-market trading.(14) Cary was convinced that the states were not effective regulators of insider trading abuses in the national markets. He believed that the SEC was the only institution that could effectively regulate the abuses, and he was determined to see qualified staff members appointed to the Commission.

Cary succeeded in having President Kennedy name Manuel Cohen and Byron Woodside to the Commission, along with former Cary law student Jack Whitney, all of whom supported Cary's more activist enforcement policies. But Kennedy's close election made broad new enabling legislation for the SEC politically impossible. Faced with that limitation, Cary sought to model the Kennedy-era SEC after the reformist, yet pragmatic, SEC chaired in the late 1930s by William O. Douglas. Aware of the demands for market reform and the necessity for a strong administrative agency to implement those reforms, Cary staffed the SEC with the best lawyers available in America. As a general commitment, Cary wanted the SEC to reestablish the balance between market vitality and investor confidence, seeking to raise fiduciary standards and to reduce the "opportunities for Exchange floor members or corporate insiders to take advantage of their positions."(15)

The intellectual battle lines would finally be drawn with the approval of the first full-scale investigation of the stock markets in twenty-five years. In 1963, the SEC conducted its Special Study of the Securities Markets. The study concluded that, from 1959 to 1962, "activity in new issues took place in a climate of general optimism and speculative interest" but as a result of agency understaffing, the SEC extended the average review of registration statements from twenty-two days in 1955 to fifty-five days in 1961. The Special Study led to a host of other investigations into the policy-making role and responsibility of the SEC in regulating national securities exchanges, associations and practices. The study underscored that the understaffing of SEC enforcement and a lack of a consistent legal theory to regulate insider trading left wide gaps in the Commission's enforcement effort.

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Footnotes:

(14) Seligman, Transformation of Wall Street, 344-45.

(15) Ibid., 294.


Related Museum Resources

Papers

March 21, 1961
image pdf (Courtesy of the National Archives and Records Administration)
May 16, 1961
transcript pdf (Courtesy of the National Archives and Records Administration)
May 18, 1961
transcript pdf (Courtesy of the National Archives and Records Administration)
June 27, 1961
image pdf (Courtesy of the National Archives and Records Administration)
July 3, 1961
transcript pdf (Courtesy of the National Archives and Records Administration)
July 5, 1961
image pdf (Courtesy of the National Archives and Records Administration)
1963
SEC Special Study of the Securities Markets

(Courtesy of Stuart Kaswell; made possible through a gift from the family of Milton H. Cohen)

Photos

May 29, 1962
Testifying before the U.S. House of Representatives
(With permission of AP/Wide World Photos; use restricted to virtual museum and archive at www.sechistorical.org )
1963
Sidney Robbins, Ralph Saul, Milton Cohen, Richard Paul and Herbert Schick

Oral Histories

29 November 2001

Milton Cohen

29 November 2001

Ralph Saul

22 March 2006

David Silver - Part I

  • - Part 1
  • - Part 2
  • - Part 3
  • edited transcript (pdf)
21 April 2006

David Silver - Part II

  • - Part 1
  • - Part 2
  • - Part 3
  • edited transcript (pdf)

Programs

04 October 2001

Roundtable on 1963 Special Study

Moderator: Brandon Becker, Irving Pollack
Presenter(s): Robert Birnbaum, Milton Cohen, Meyer Eisenberg, Norman Poser, Eugene Rotberg, Ralph Saul, Fred Siesel, David Silver, Stanley Sporkin

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