"Somehow"

Michael Lewis, writing in the NYT:

Created to protect investors from financial predators, the [Securities and Exchange] Commission has somehow evolved into a mechanism for protecting financial predators with political clout from investors.

Lewis goes on to describe how enforcement officials at the SEC hoped to trade up from the commission to sweet-paying gigs on The Street (thus destroying their incentives to actually enforce people who might one day hire them).

But that "somehow" -- in an otherwise terrific, informative piece -- bugs me. The SEC's "evolution" is not a mystery. Extracting the teeth of the SEC was by design. George W. Bush appointed Chris Cox to run the SEC and Chris Cox hasn't had much use for enforcement or regulation of any sort. It's okay to name names and to cop to the fact that this wasn't some organic process. So I'd feel better if the sentence read as follows:

Created to protect investors from financial predators, the [Securities and Exchange] Commission was re-engineered by the Bush administration into a mechanism for protecting financial predators with political clout from investors.

Anyway, other than that very small quibble, The End of the Financial World as We Know It (and its companion piece How to Repair a Broken Financial World) are very worthwhile (as is Lewis's December "Portfolio" piece The End of Wall Street's Boom).