The sum of all parts

摘要

It was circa 1987 and we were in Switzerland on a boat from Lucerne to Bürgenstock for the annual Swiss Commodities and Futures Association meeting. She said she wanted to show me something and unzipped her suitcase to pull out a picture or two dogs. The picture was in the actual frame - not just a wrinkled polaroid. "I always travel with a picture of them," she said. As a dog person, I thought it was endearing. As a journalist, that memory always reminds me that regulators are human and have softer sides that typically we - or those they regulate - don't see. The "she" was Mary Schapiro, now chairman of the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC). At the time she was general counsel of the Futures Industry Association (FLA). We both were a lot younger then, but having watched Mary of the FIA move to the SEC to the Commodity Futures Trading Commission (CFTC) to the Financial Industry Regulatory Authority (Finra) to now Chairman Schapiro at the SEC gives me a certain sense of pride of knowing her when. No doubt becoming the first female chair of the SEC was a more difficult road than the one we took to Biirgenstock.