Mary Schapiro Quotes

Our purpose, as we face these challenges, remains clear - fair and orderly markets that allow for efficient capital formation, while protecting the interests of investors.

Our financial markets work best when they are competitive, fair, and transparent.

As a whole, investors should welcome attempts to safeguard the integrity of markets. You need very clear rules applied to markets.

I don't feel any pressure at all to go along with anybody. I feel pressure to do the right thing for U.S. markets and U.S. investors.

It should strengthen investors' confidence. This is done through transparency, high quality financial reports, and a standardized economic market. This is not just for China, but also for the world market as a whole.

Too often, investors are the target of fraudulent schemes disguised as investment opportunities. As you know, if the balance is tipped to the point where investors are not confident that there are appropriate protections, investors will lose confidence in our markets, and capital formation will ultimately be made more difficult and expensive.

The financial crisis is a stark reminder that transparency and disclosure are essential in today's marketplace.

The SEC has actually progressively loosened up the rules and recognized the value of social media, but the goal is always going to be to get information out as broadly as possible as quickly as possible.

Nobody wants to be against technology, but I think that regulators should not - and people should not - assume that faster is always better in markets. We need to question technology to insure that markets continue to perform their fundamental purposes.

Consumer groups fought hard to provide investor protections for 'special entities' such as pension funds, schools, and municipalities who purchase swaps. No comparable protection exists in the futures market.

In order to work well, markets need a basic level of trust.

There are no absolutes in this world, and there will always be mistakes that are made within brokerage firms; there will always be people who set out to deceive the regulators and even deceive their own senior management.

There is not necessarily a good reason why a regulator should have to be involved in product design and marketing for rich and sophisticated investors. We recommend that such investors should be able to sign a piece of paper, which allows them to go ahead and buy unregulated products at their own risk.

It is incumbent on us to facilitate the development of a market structure that best assures that these changes benefit the U.S. securities markets as a whole.

We can't expect Wall Street to police itself - that's why we have a federal government.

How can you allow the trading companies to locate computers closer to exchanges and flash millions of bids to give an unfair advantage?... Even professionals are losing faith in some aspects of the system.

Short-sellers perform a useful function in the market as conduits of negative information, and shorts often complain that they are discriminated against by regulators.

I hope we’re on the road to more truth-telling to investors.

You cannot have fairness unless you have transparency…We don’t know that is going on inside those boxes … we could have a meltdown [in the entire economy].

The big-ego temper tantrums of Wall Street's titans must be a concern for everyone on Wall Street. Bad behavior and manipulation of the markets must be called out by those in the industry concerned for its future.

The TMPG is the place where market participants recognize and address their responsibilities to each other.

Without doubt, timely and democratic access to financial and market information contributes to smoothly functioning financial markets.

Despite its heightened duty, at times the SEC has been inattentive to economic analysis.

Regulation of derivatives transactions that are privately negotiated by professionals is unnecessary.

The SEC does way more good than harm - the last thing I would do is get rid of the SEC...if accounting were thoroughly fixed, a lot of other sins would go away. We're paying a huge price for deterioration of accounting.