Hello Fabio,

Thank you for your feedback on the piece. The point of the piece was not to be a treatise on the subject of SEC under/over/just right funding, but a simple 500 word or so comparison of the SEC budget relative to other items.

To dismiss the figures above you have to dismiss them on principle alone because the orders of magnitude of difference between the SEC budget relative to the size of the resources it is meant to safeguard are so great. For example, that the net working capital of one U.S. bank, and not its largest bank either, is the size of 24.6 SECs is meaningful. Even if we factor in the other regulatory authorities I know that their combined budgets are still going to be less than the net working capital of one bank. And that one bank is just one institution amongst 10,000 publicly traded companies in the United States.

A stat that did not make the final cut is that the SEC's computers take about two months to analyze all of the trades from just one trading day. This stat was revealed before the U.S. Congress by the SEC when it was describing its efforts at interpreting trading data from the "Flash Crash."

While the issue was not framed how you would prefer it to be framed, I still feel that there is compelling information here.

Thanks, and with smiles!

Jason A. Voss, CFA