SEC Chairman William H. Donaldson Remarks to the Securities Industry Association November 7, 2003
Ladies and gentlemen: Good morning and thank you for having me here today. I must begin by reminding you that the views I express here today are my own and do not necessarily represent the views of the Commission or its staff. And let me warn you that my message today is an unpleasant, but important one. It's a message that I hope each of you will seriously consider. The SIA, as the primary trade group for the nation's broker dealers, is in a unique position to be an active participant in the solution to the ills facing the securities industry today. I use the word "ills" deliberately, too. Since joining the SEC, I have been distressed by the conduct we have seen from key participants in our nation's securities markets. The most recent examples of this conduct are, of course, the late trading and market timing abuses that have been dominating the headlines. These offenses now must be added to a laundry list of industry wrongdoing, which includes the analysts' conflicts, IPO abuses, the failures to give investors the breakpoint discounts to which they were entitled, sales practice abuses, and the hidden incentives some brokers have when favoring one mutual fund over another. I am left with the conclusion that these occurrences represent a fundamental betrayal of our nation's investors, and are symptomatic of a disease that has afflicted far too many in the industry. And, while I don't want to indict the whole industry for these recent problems, we all must work together to combat them and to work toward finding the proper remedies for the industry's woes.
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==================================== To this day, no one has come up with a set of rules for originality. There aren't any. [Les Paul]