Finra chief tapped to head up regulator

President-elect Barack Obama has nominated Mary Schapiro, the chief executive of the Financial Industry Regulatory Authority Inc. of New York and Washington, as chairwoman of the Securities and Exchange Commission. Characterizing her as “smart and tough,” Mr. Obama said that the Bernard Madoff case, in which the trader is charged with conducting a $50 billion Ponzi scheme, has highlighted the need for stronger regulation. Regulators have been “asleep at the switch,” Mr. Obama said. Ms. Schapiro, 53, was appointed an SEC commissioner in 1988 by President Ronald Reagan. She became chairman of the Commodity Futures Trading Commission in 1994 and then president and vice chairman of regulation at NASD, Finra’s predecessor, in 2004 before being named NASD's chairwoman and chief executive in 2006. If Ms. Schapiro is confirmed by the Senate for the SEC post, she will become the first woman to lead the agency that oversees the nation's securities markets. Ms. Schapiro, an independent, replaces Christopher L. Cox, a Republican, who was appointed by President George W. Bush in June 2005 after a 17-year stint as a congressman from California. Unlike Mr. Cox, who was not well-known to many in the financial services community before his appointment, Ms. Schapiro is intimately familiar with movers and shakers in the financial world. Just last month, for example, she addressed dozens of brokerage firm executives at a conference that Pershing LLC of Jersey City, NJ, held in New York for its clearing and custodial customers and, a week earlier, addressed “The Role of the SEC in a Post-Regulatory Reform Environment” at the annual meeting of the Securities Industry and Financial Markets Association of Washington in New York. In other nominations, Mr. Obama named Gary Gensler to run the Commodity Futures Trading Commission. Mr. Gensler previously served as the undersecretary of the Treasury in the Clinton administration and was a partner at The Goldman Sachs Group Inc. of New York. Daniel Tarullo was nominated to serve on the Federal Reserve Board of Governors. A professor of law at the Georgetown University Law Center in Washington, he held several senior positions in the Clinton administration before serving as the assistant to the president for international economic policy.