The exchange's president had been caught raiding the widows' and orphans' fund. The chairman of the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) was sounding threatening. So it was that in 1938 the New York Stock Exchange (NYSE) placed its fate in the hands of William McChesney Martin, a 31-year-old security analyst nicknamed "Mr Chocolate" because hot cocoa, not the whisky favoured by others on Wall Street, was his beverage of choice. Similarly, in the early 1960s, the crew who ran the American Stock Exchange were pushed out after an investigation prompted by the SEC. The lead investigator soon became the exchange's head. And in 1996 it was the turn of the technology-oriented NASDAQ stockmarket. Under pressure from the SEC'S then chairman, Arthur Levitt, the market hired an ex-senator with a reputation for probity and sacked all its senior staff for breaking trading rules.
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