Christopher Cox

Christopher Cox served as Chairman of the Securities and Exchange Commission from 2005 to 2009. His tenure encompassed the financial crisis, during which he faced criticism for the SEC's voluntary supervision program for major investment banks — a program he later described as a "fatally flawed" regulatory approach. Cox also implemented emergency short-selling bans during the crisis. He is a former Republican congressman from California and later worked in private practice. His regulatory experience during the crisis contributed to subsequent debate about SEC reform. Prior to the SEC, he had served in the Reagan White House as a senior associate counsel and as a Republican member of the House of Representatives from California for 17 years. His congressional background gave him a political perspective on regulatory enforcement. At the SEC, he oversaw the Regulation NMS equity market structure reforms that transformed US stock market structure and the emergence of electronic trading and high-frequency market makers. The voluntary regulatory program for investment bank holding companies, established in 2004 under his predecessor, allowed firms like Lehman and Bear Stearns to use internal risk models for capital calculation — a flexibility that contributed to dangerous leverage levels before the crisis. His post-crisis admission that the program was fundamentally flawed was an unusually candid regulatory self-assessment.