President Obama made two notable personnel announcements on Thursday.
First, Mary Jo White, a New York prosecutor that took down John Gotti, will be nominated to be the new head of the Securities and Exchange Commission.
“As one former SEC chairman said, Mary Jo ‘does not intimidate easily.’” Obama said. “And that’s important, because she has a big job ahead of her. The SEC played a critical role in protecting our financial system during the worst of the financial crisis. But there’s much more work to be done to complete the task of reforming Wall Street and making sure that American investors are better informed and better protected going forward. And we need to keep going after irresponsible behavior in the financial industry so that taxpayers don’t pay the price.”
Obama also announced his intention to nominate Richard Cordray as director of the Consumer Financial Protection Board. Cordray was appointed to that same position last year, but his appointment came without Senate approval and was set to run out at the end of this year.
“As a former attorney general of Ohio with a long record of working with Democrats and Republicans on behalf of the American people, nobody questioned Richard’s qualifications,” Obama said. “But he wasn’t allowed an up or down vote in the Senate, and as a consequence, I took action to appoint him on my own. And over the last year, Richard has proved to be a champion of American consumers.”
