The Securities and Exchange Commission is outmanned and outgunned by the folks it is trying to police, according to an August 20 article in the Wall Street Journal by Tom McGinty and Kara Scannell. The SEC turned over daily surveillance of the markets to the markets’ own self-regulatory organizations (“SROs”) long ago. Now, under pressure from Congress and investors to prove it is up to the job, after its glaring failures in the Madoff Ponzi scheme and other scandals, Chairman Mary Shapiro’s SEC is trying desperately to catch up. But surveillance of complex modern markets requires “the quantitative, analytical capacity that the agency has never had,” observes Jonathan Katz, who left the SEC in 2006 after 20 years as secretary.