Firmness at the SEC

Last August was hardly an ideal time for Ray Garrett Jr., 53, to become chairman of the Securities and Exchange Commission. The watchdog agency's staff was demoralized by the departure under fire three months earlier of G. Bradford Cook, Garrett's predecessor, who got himself entangled in the Robert Vesco scandal. And the securities industry was then, as it still is, in severe economic trouble.

Garrett, a Chicago securities lawyer who served on the SEC staff in the 1950s, quickly supported the elevation of Veteran Staffer Irving M. Pollack to a seat on the five-member commission (TIME, Feb. 11), a move that boosted morale by demonstrating respect for professionalism. Enforcement activities have picked up, as the recent filing of long-awaited fraud suits in the Penn Central case shows.

Garrett also permitted a general rise in commission rates to bring some relief to Wall Street's beleaguered brokers. In exchange he set a firm deadline of April 30, 1975, for scrapping fixed commissions on all trades and substituting negotiated commissions. "We decided," says Garrett, "to stop the uncertainty and fix the timetable." That comment underscores his determination to set in motion reforms that have been stuck in the SEC's pipeline for years. One of the more important is a proposal to flash on a single composite tape the latest prices for securities traded on any exchange in the country. Garrett reports that a 40-week trial run for 15 representative securities will begin in October.

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