The Government’s Responsibility in Managing Financial System Chaos:

Lessons from 9/11 and Today

Harvey Pitt

Chief Executive Officer of Kalorama Partners, LLC

26th Chairman of the Securities and Exchange Commission

Usually, regulatory agencies occupy themselves with ensuring the fairness of the interactions between regulated companies and the public.  However, at other times, government regulators are obligated to address extraordinary events that threaten the potential collapse of America’s financial system.   One such crisis was caused by external events on September 11, 2001 – terrorist strikes that took down this Country’s capital markets.

Today, we face an economic crisis of unparalleled dimensions, caused by both government and private sector missteps, a crisis that has spawned massive intervention by the government and now potentially new and dramatic changes in the government’s regulatory paradigm.

To lead a discussion of the ethical and substantive issues with which government is confronted when crises of this type occur, we are pleased to have Harvey Pitt, former Chairman of the Securities and Exchange Commission from 2001 through 2003.  Mr. Pitt’s experience as SEC Chairman in the aftermath of September 11, and the methodology he employed to get our securities markets back up and running will provide an appropriate backdrop for his assessment of how the government is handling our current financial crisis and what steps need to be taken.

Harvey L. Pitt is the Chief Executive Officer of the global business consulting firm, Kalorama Partners, LLC.  Prior to founding Kalorama Partners, Mr. Pitt was appointed by President George W. Bush to serve as the twenty-sixth Chairman of the United States Securities and Exchange Commission.  In that role, from 2001 until 2003, Mr. Pitt was responsible, among other things, for overseeing the SEC’s response to the market disruptions resulting from the terrorist attacks of 9/11, for creating the SEC’s “real time enforcement” program, and for leading the Commission’s adoption of dozens of rules in response to the corporate and accounting crises generated by the excesses of the 1990s.  Mr. Pitt was a professional colleague and lifelong close personal friend of Alan Levenson, whose memory and commitment to ethics this program honors.

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