Era 04 · 1930s — 1980s

SEC & Regulated Media

Who speaks

A regulated press

Pulse cycle

3.5s

FDR's reforms imposed disclosure on markets and licensing on broadcast. The SEC required public companies to tell the truth. The Fed published minutes — but with a five-year delay. Secrecy became official policy.

Events in this era

1934

Securities Exchange Act

Congress passed the Securities Exchange Act in June 1934, creating the SEC and extending the previous year's Securities Act from issuance to secondary trading. Public companies were required to file audited annual and quarterly financials, register their securities, and disclose insider holdings. Market manipulation, wash trading, and pools of the kind that fueled the 1920s were made federal offenses. Joseph Kennedy, a prior operator of those same pools, was appointed first SEC chair. The regime remains the foundation of US securities law.

Birth of modern investor-protection law

1978

Humphrey-Hawkins Act

The Full Employment and Balanced Growth Act, sponsored by Hubert Humphrey and Augustus Hawkins, was signed by President Carter in October 1978. It required the Federal Reserve chair to testify before Congress twice a year on monetary policy and economic projections. Until then the Fed operated almost entirely in private. Even FOMC minutes were released with a five-year delay. The testimony requirement was the first durable crack in an institutional culture of opacity that had gone essentially unchallenged since 1913.

First structural crack in Fed opacity

Aug 1, 1949

FCC Fairness Doctrine

The Federal Communications Commission required broadcast licensees to present controversial public issues with balanced perspectives. It governed TV and radio for 38 years. During its reign, financial and political commentary both carried an implicit obligation to present alternative views.

Shaped US broadcast news until 1987

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