This Cop Means Business

摘要

Securities & Exchange Commission Chairman William H. Donaldson rose at 4:30 a.m. on a recent Saturday to fly from New York to San Francisco. By lunchtime, he was discussing economics with Nobel laureate Milton Friedman at former Secretary of State George P. Shultz's home in Palo Alto. Then it was on to a two-hour meeting to debate a dozen high-tech executives over Donaldson's insistence that their companies should deduct the cost of employee stock options from earnings. The next day, he spoke at Stanford Law School about restoring business integrity. After taking the red-eye flight back to New York, Donaldson spent Monday, June 2, plowing through paperwork before his wife, Jane, surprised him with a party for his 72nd birthday at Manhattan's River Club. The clear message: The SEC isn't Bill Donaldson's retirement home. When the former Wall Streeter and lifelong friend of the Bush family took over on Feb. 18, the betting was that he'd be a caretaker, put in to clean up the mess left by former Chairman Harvey L. Pitt and get corporate scandals off the front page long before the 2004 elections. Instead, Donaldson has turned up the heat on wrongdoers, increased penalties for financial fraud, and named a hard-line critic to police accountants.