It's ridiculous that the law enforcement agency charged with policing the entire financial sector, the SEC, doesn't even have half the budget of the NYPD. Some estimates of total annual securities fraud are upwards of $800 billion a year (the SEC catches about 1% of it). That's like 70 times all larceny, robbery, burglary and auto theft in the US combined. #USPolitics #USPol 🧵
Firstly, no, that's not the SEC's job.
They don't police the entire financial sector: other agencies ranging from the FTC through the IRS through even the Secret Service police financial matters.
Secondly, if you really want to go that direction, the SEC's focus on securities sort of means they're working for mostly rich people to protect rich peoples' investments.
I wouldn't go there myself, though.
@volkris
I wasn't trying to suggest the SEC was the only agency that deals with financial matters, they are key to securities fraud policing though, and they are under resourced to a horrifying extent. A lot of securities fraud does affect regular people to a huge extent even though they're not necessarily directly parties to the transactions being policed. Capital markets determine resource allocation in the economy and the fallout of securities fraud falls hardest on people who aren't wealthy.
@volkris
The SEC polices the entire financial sector but not everything the financial sector does. Also while the SEC isn't in charge of prosecution of all financial issues, they only deal directly with civil and administrative enforcement, my understanding is their investigation is actually key to most criminal securities fraud enforcement as well as a lot of other enforcement, they refer the cases they investigate to the DOJ and other state and federal agencies for actual enforcement.