Matt Taibbi Takes Up SEC’s Andrew Bowden Regulatory Capture Scandal

Matt Taibbi has written a characteristically informative, incisive piece about the embarrassing spectacle of the SEC’s Director of Compliance Inspections and Examinations, Andrew Bowden, making sycophantic remarks about the private equity industry at a recent conference, a story we broke early last week. It’s bad enough to see a regulator so besotted by firms he oversees; it’s even worse in light of statements Bowden made less than a year ago the widespread fraud and misconduct he said his examiners were finding. As we wrote in our original post:

Bowden stated that the SEC had found “violations of law or material compliance failures” in more than half the firms examined. Let’s not put too fine a point on this: the SEC said that most firms were stealing from investors, either by accident or design. Bowden confirmed that view, later telling the New York Times’ Gretchen Morgenson that “investors’ pockets are being picked.”

In case you have yet to see it, contrast that view of the industry with Bowden’s take a mere ten months later:

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