Mary Jo White, a prosecutor and former U.S. attorney in Manhattan, will be nominated by President Barack Obama to be the next chairman of the Securities and Exchange Commission, according to a White House statement.
The president will also re-nominate Richard Cordray as director of the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau. He was named to the post in January 2012 with a recess appointment that bypassed Senate confirmation.
Obama is scheduled to make the announcements at 2:30 p.m. Washington time in the White House.
“In his first term, the president put in place historic consumer protections and the strongest reforms of Wall Street since the Great Depression,” the White House said in the statement. Today, these two people will show “we are effectively implementing these reforms so that Wall Street is held accountable and middle class Americans never again are harmed by the abuses of a few.”
White’s nomination is a departure for the agency, because it has tended to be run by lawyers steeped in financial policy making and the securities industry.
White was U.S. attorney for the Southern District of New York from 1993 to 2002, and became a leading terrorism prosecutor, winning the conviction of four followers of Osama bin Laden for the 1998 bombings of two U.S. embassies in Africa.
She also was on the board of the Nasdaq stock market.
The Consumer Financial Protection Bureau was created after the financial crisis to be an independent watchdog for consumers. Obama named Cordray as its first director after Senate Republicans threatened to block his nomination.
The agency, charged with boosting consumer protection, has taken actions in such areas as homeowner protection, credit card deception, debt collection and student lending.
Cordray’s current appointment expires at the end of this year.
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