Securities Exchange Act Signed
Signed June 6, 1934, roughly five years after Black Tuesday. The Act created the Securities and Exchange Commission and established the first federal disclosure regime for US public companies. It banned market manipulation and insider trading at the statutory level. Joseph Kennedy was named the first SEC chair. Periodic reporting, proxy rules, and registration of exchanges followed. The enforcement apparatus Congress built in 1934 remains the core of American securities law more than 90 years later.
FDR's first SEC chair, Joseph Kennedy, was himself one of the great market manipulators of the 1920s. 'Takes a crook to catch a crook,' Roosevelt was said to have remarked.
03 · The SEC
The 1929 crash revealed that US public companies were under essentially no obligation to tell the truth. It took five years, a 90% decline in the Dow, and a new administration for Congress to create the Securities and Exchange Commission.
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