SEC examines acts by companies as 2008 crash neared
The head of the Securities and Exchange Commission confirmed Wednesday that the agency was investigating several companies’ actions in the run-up to the financial crisis of 2008.
SEC Chairman Mary Schapiro said "it would be safe to assume" that the agency was looking very closely at the conduct of a number of firms during this time. She did not name the companies.
Schapiro spoke in testimony to a House Appropriations subcommittee weighing the agency’s request for about $1.3 billion for the budget year starting Oct. 1, a 12 percent increase from the current year.
Lawmakers want to know if the sort of accounting gimmick recently uncovered that was used by the collapsed investment firm Lehman Brothers to mask billions in debt was widely deployed on Wall Street.
The SEC’s review of the Lehman Brothers disaster "has taken us down a path where we’re looking broadly," Schapiro said after her testimony.
The implosion of Lehman Brothers Holdings Inc. into the biggest bankruptcy in U.S. history in September 2008 precipitated the financial meltdown that plunged the economy into the most severe recession since the 1930s.
After saddling itself with tens of billions in troubled assets that couldn’t easily be sold, Lehman masked $50 billion in debt and its perilous financial condition by using the so-called Repo 105 accounting gimmick, an examiner appointed by the bankruptcy court found in an extensive report issued last week personal loans for people with bad credit.
Questions are being raised about the supervision of Lehman by the SEC and the Federal Reserve in the months before its collapse.
"The culture of the agency is changing. It doesn’t happen overnight," Schapiro told the lawmakers. "We’re working very hard at the SEC … to rebuild the agency’s credibility."
In the meltdown’s wake, the SEC and the Justice Department launched wide-ranging investigations of companies across the financial services industry, believed to include American International Group Inc. and mortgage giants Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac as well as Lehman. A year and a half after the financial crisis struck, charges haven’t yet come in most of the investigations.
The autopsy of Lehman issued last week by bankruptcy examiner Anton Valukas could serve as a valuable road map for the two agencies in their investigations, experts say.
Schapiro said Wednesday that the report raised "some very interesting points" and would be "helpful."