Delamaide: Tougher SEC may lift Wall Street morals

WASHINGTON — The new head of the Securities and Exchange Commission took a small step last week toward getting tougher on Wall Street, though just how tough remains to be seen. Mary Jo White, a former prosecutor and corporate lawyer who took the helm of the SEC in April, said the agency will start making some exceptions to its standing rule to settle cases without requiring violators to admit wrongdoing. This might seem obvious when the SEC brings charges of deception, fraud, violation of securities laws and other misdeeds, but the agency typically relies on the curious legal fiction that a company can pay hundreds of millions of dollars in a settlement but doesn’t have to admit that it did all these bad things.
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