Four years after he left the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission, Arthur Levitt said he wished he had pushed harder for stock options to be expensed and for analysts to reveal conflict of interests, according to On Wall Street magazine.
Levitt, who spent eight years as SEC chairman, also recalls his early years as a stockbroker at the firm that became Smith Barney, and says he doesn’t think Wall Street ethics have fallen to a nadir. “In most ways, brokers are better trained and supervised and more professional than ever before,” he says in the June issue.