A Billionaire to Regulate Billionares at the SEC

Important Update:  February 8, 2015 - Norm Champ, who head up the Securities and Exchange Commission's Division of Investment Management left the SEC last month to become a visiting scholar at Harvard Law School and an investment management law lecturer. 

In an unrelated story we just learned that the revolving door between Wall Street executives and executive government jobs is well funded and very lucrative for some fake civil servants claiming to want to give back to society by sacrificing to work for government. Why am I not surprised? http://www.newrepublic.com/…/wall-street-pays-bankers-work-…

A TALE OF TWO NORMS

Norman B. Champ Jr:  SEC Director and Welfare Prince

NORM AS DIRECTOR:

SEC Names Norm Champ as Director of Division of Investment Management

FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE
2012-129

Washington, D.C., July 5, 2012 – The Securities and Exchange Commission today announced that Norm Champ has been named Director of the agency’s Division of Investment Management.

Mr. Champ has been serving as Deputy Director of the SEC’s Office of Compliance Inspections and Examinations (OCIE). He assumes his new duties on July 9 and succeeds Eileen Rominger, who is retiring.

The SEC’s Division of Investment Management protects investors and promotes capital formation through oversight and regulation of the nation’s multi-trillion dollar investment management industry. Prior to joining the SEC staff in 2010, Mr. Champ was general counsel for 10 years as well as a member of the executive committee and a partner at investment management firm Chilton Investment Company, a multi-national adviser to private funds and managed accounts.

“Norm has proven himself to be a natural leader and an expert at managing programs that bolster our financial markets and protect investors,” said SEC Chairman Mary L. Schapiro. “His breadth of experience and deep insight into so many aspects of the securities industry will well serve investors and the agency.”

Mr. Champ said, “I am honored to join the Division and continue to carry out the SEC’s missions of protecting investors and encouraging capital formation. I look forward to working with the Division’s talented and knowledgeable staff as we continue shaping the rules by which the asset management industry is governed.”

In OCIE, where he sits on the Executive and Operating Committees, Mr. Champ has served as the acting head of the broker-dealer, investment adviser/investment company and credit rating agency exam programs and as acting chief counsel. Mr. Champ led the creation of OCIE’s first Examination Manual.

During his SEC tenure, Mr. Champ has received the Chairman’s Award for Law and Policy for his role in OCIE’s implementation of the Dodd-Frank Act and the Chairman’s Award for Labor-Management Relations for his role in the reorganization of OCIE.

“Norm has made a tremendous contribution to OCIE in the last 2½ years as a leader of the National Examination Program,” said Carlo di Florio, Director of OCIE.

Mr. Champ is a lecturer at Harvard Law School, where he has taught a course on private funds investment management law. Mr. Champ is currently teaching this course to 120 SEC colleagues.

Mr. Champ joined the SEC staff in January 2010 as the Associate Regional Director for Investment Adviser/Investment Company Examinations in the SEC’s New York Regional Office. He became Deputy Director of OCIE in June 2010. Prior to working at Chilton Investment Company, Mr. Champ was a lawyer at the firm of Davis Polk & Wardwell and spent two years as a law clerk for the Honorable Charles S. Haight, Jr. of the U.S. District Court for the Southern District of New York.

Mr. Champ received his bachelor’s degree from Princeton University, summa cum laude, in 1985. He received his master’s degree in 1986 from King’s College University of London, where he was a Fulbright Scholar. He earned his juris doctor degree from Harvard Law School, cum laude, in 1989.

NORM AS WELFARE PRINCE:

This article was first published in the New York Press.

… Most people know next to nothing about this $20 billion-a-year welfare for the rich program, probably because the billionaires want it that way. Why get the masses worked up? Best to let them think the $200 billion they spent from 1995 through 2006 went to friendly farmers with cute farmhouses, rather than to Chevron or Kenneth Lay. Better to let urban entrepreneurs call themselves backyard farmers and toil away for the locavore movement, than to realize that their rich neighbors are reaping actual “farm” subsidies.

Now, farm subsidies weren’t always this criminal and, until fairly recently, had been doing what New Deal programs were designed to do: help the little guy. But the freemarket “reforms” of the Reagan-Clinton Era warped the welfare, redirecting farm subsidies from the have-nots to the have-mores, bankrupting all but the biggest farmers and depositing farm subsides into the bank accounts of the rich.

There’s no need to go to Iowa to see this welfare-for-the-rich in action. You can see it on the Upper East Side, where billionaire elites collect huge welfare checks from the government just for being rich, while a few blocks away, in one of the poorest, most ghettoized districts in the United States, the city’s black population is being purged from food stamp rolls for smoking some dope. Because, as Mayor Rudy Giuliani once wisely said, “As soon as they stop being dependent on the government, they’re moving in a much healthier direction.”

But brutal freemarket ideas don’t apply to members of Manhattan’s genteel farmer class, even billionaires like Norman B. Champ III, who received nearly a half-million dollars in welfare payments for poor farmers, despite the fact that he lives in a multimillion dollar co-op at 828 Park Avenue. From 1995 to 2006, he raked in a total of $405,807 in dairy, corn and soy subsidies via his stake in the Champ family’s dairy farm in Missouri, his home state. Handout-for-handout, even Reagan’s mythic Cadillac-driving Chicago welfare queen and her $150,000 welfare scam got nothing on Champ, who could buy a Lamborghini and still have money left over to reupholster his private jet.

Norman B. Champ III, 47, was born into a wealthy, upper-crust Missouri family and lived a privileged life (the Champs had a Missouri village named after them in their honor: the Village of Champ). He graduated summa cum laude from Princeton University, went to England for a masters in war studies from King’s College and earned a law degree—cum laude, of course—from Harvard, after which he finally settled down at Chilton Investment Company, a multi-billion dollar hedge fund. He had added three titles to his name—Executive Vice President, General Counsel, Chief Compliance Officer—by the time the markets crashed. He lost no time jumping ship to a cushy government job with the Securities and Exchange Commission, coming on board in January 2010 to start a new life as a financial regulator at the SEC’s New York Inspections and Examinations Division. He now leads a team of 100 hardworking investigators in a crusade to crack down on the shady dealings of his hedge-fund buddies.

An upper-crust billionaire type who lives in one of the nation’s wealthiest ZIP codes and collects welfare meant for struggling farmers? Whatta champ!

He might not be what most of us expect a welfare queen to look like, but that’s only because we have been duped by the whole poverty thing, convinced that the crumbs we throw the needy are a huge burden on our budget. So we look for any way to cut them off. For those who want to observe a real subsidy queen in his natural habitat, there’s no better place than Park Avenue. I am not trying to be ironic here. The people are literally welfare queens: They live where queens live and take money from the poor like queens do.