1. Charles Christopher Cox was born on October 16,1952 and is an American attorney and politician who served as chair of the US Securities and Exchange Commission, a 17-year Republican member of the United States House of Representatives, and member of the White House staff in the Reagan Administration.
Christopher Cox was a member of Delta Tau Delta fraternity.
Christopher Cox eventually regained the ability to walk but wore a harness of steel bars and leather straps for six months.
In 1984, Christopher Cox co-founded Context Corporation, which produced daily English reproductions of the leading Soviet state-controlled newspaper, Pravda.
Christopher Cox's duties included advising on the nomination of three Supreme Court justices, the establishment of the Brady Commission following the 1987 market crash, and the drafting of legislative reform proposals for the federal budget process.
Coincidentally, eight months prior to the crash, Chief of Staff Howard Baker had asked Christopher Cox to write a detailed memo describing the emergency powers that the President might exercise in a market crisis.
At the time, some conservatives were pushing for a constitutional convention to advance a balanced budget amendment, and Christopher Cox conducted research on the question.
Christopher Cox represented the White House at hearings on the advisability of releasing John Hinckley from St Elizabeth's Hospital following Hinckley's attempted assassination of President Reagan, and led the vetting and research effort that resulted in Northwestern Law School Dean David Ruder being recommended to the president as SEC Chairman in 1987.
Christopher Cox was elected to Congress in 1988 from what was then California's 40th congressional district.
Christopher Cox was re-elected eight more times from this Orange County-based district, which was renumbered as the 47th District in 1993 and the 48th District in 2003.
Early in his congressional career, Christopher Cox befriended two anti-Communists in Hungary and Lithuania who had been prisoners of conscience and who later became presidents of their countries after the end of Soviet domination.
Christopher Cox met Arpad Goncz in 1989, and when Christopher Cox was later married, he spent part of his honeymoon in Hungary with then-President Goncz and his wife Maria Zsuzsanna Gonter.
Christopher Cox met Dr Vytautas Landsbergis, a professor at the Conservatory of Music in Vilnius, in 1989, well before the successful reestablishment of Lithuanian independence.
In May 1998, Christopher Cox was presented with the Order of the Lithuanian Grand Duke Gediminas, the highest honor the Republic of Lithuania can give to a living noncitizen.
Together with the Baltic-American Enterprise Fund, the Hungarian-American Enterprise Fund, and seven other enterprise funds in Central and Eastern Europe and the former Soviet Union, the Christopher Cox legislation, incorporated in the Support Eastern European Democracy Act, matched US foreign aid with venture capital in the newly free countries of the former Warsaw Pact.
In 1994, Christopher Cox was appointed by President Clinton to the Bipartisan Commission on Entitlement and Tax Reform, which in 1995 published a unanimous report warning that the nation cannot continue to allow entitlement programs to consume a rapidly increasing share of the federal budget.
Christopher Cox wrote the only law that was enacted over President Bill Clinton's veto, the Private Securities Litigation Reform Act of 1995, aimed at protecting investors from fraudulent and extortionate lawsuits.
For 10 of his 17 years in the Congress, from 1995 to 2005, Christopher Cox served in the House Majority Leadership as Chairman of the House Republican Policy Committee, the fifth-ranking elected leadership position.
Christopher Cox was Chairman of the House Committee on Homeland Security, and Chairman of the Select Committee on US National Security that produced the Cox Report, an indictment of Chinese espionage and of security failures at several US national laboratories.
When Congress established the Bipartisan Study Group on Enhancing Multilateral Export Controls through federal legislation in 1999, Christopher Cox was tapped as co-chairman.
Christopher Cox served as Chairman of the Select Committee on Homeland Security ; Chairman of the Task Force on Capital Markets; and Chairman of the Task Force on Budget Process Reform.
Christopher Cox withdrew his name from consideration before a nomination could be made because one of his home state Democratic Senators, Barbara Boxer, objected to him due to his perceived conservatism.
The seat that Christopher Cox had been considered for was eventually filled by Bush nominee Carlos Bea.
Christopher Cox returned to work "after several weeks recovering from surgery," according to The Associated Press.
In May 2008, Christopher Cox delivered the Commencement Address at Northeastern University in Boston, Massachusetts.
On July 15,2008, Christopher Cox told a US House hearing that the Commission was studying the potential institution of "a price test that could work with an increment of a nickel or dime" or some more meaningful amount.
Christopher Cox introduced new technology for investor disclosure, compliance analytics, nationwide investigative work sharing, and management of funds recovered for investors.
Between 2005 and 2008, Christopher Cox signed supervisory arrangements covering enforcement and regulatory cooperation with regulators in the United Kingdom, France, the Netherlands, Belgium, Portugal, Australia, Germany, Bulgaria, and Norway.
Christopher Cox initiated a mutual recognition process for foreign regulators, based on an assessment of whether the securities regulatory system in another country produces comparably high-quality results for investors, including in the area of enforcement.
In late December 2008, following the confession by New York investment advisor Bernard Madoff and the filing of SEC charges against him alleging a $50 billion fraud, Christopher Cox stated that he was "gravely concerned" that "specific and credible evidence" provided to the agency over a period of at least 10 years had not previously been referred to the Commission for commencement of a formal investigation.
Christopher Cox ordered an internal investigation by the agency's Inspector General.
On September 26,2008, Christopher Cox ended the 2004 program for voluntary regulation of investment bank holding companies, begun under SEC Chairman William Donaldson and then-Director of Market Regulation Annette Nazareth.
Christopher Cox said that during the buildup of the credit crisis, when the credit rating agencies were still unregulated, they gave top credit ratings to financial instruments which packaged risky loans and spread the negative impacts of the credit crisis more broadly throughout the markets.
Christopher Cox stepped down as Chairman of the SEC at the end of the Bush administration, on January 20,2009.
Christopher Cox served as president of Bingham Consulting LLC, the firm's global strategic consulting business.
In February 2020, Christopher Cox retired as a partner of Morgan Lewis and as president of Morgan Lewis Consulting, taking the title of counsel at the law firm.
Christopher Cox is a member of the board of directors of Revitate, an investor in real estate, sports, and consumer products, and of NetChoice, an internet industry association.
Christopher Cox is a life trustee of the University of Southern California and a member of the advisory boards of New York-based Blue Flame AI and the Loker Hydrocarbon Research Institute, founded by Nobel Prize winner George A Olah.
Christopher Cox serves as Chair of the Rhodes Scholarship selection committee for Southern California, and is a Senior Scholar in Residence at the University of California, Irvine.
Christopher Cox formerly served on the boards of directors of photonics manufacturer Newport Corporation, governance, risk, and compliance firm ACA Group, and health care companies RxSight, Inc.
Christopher Cox is a member of the board of directors of the Forum for Corporate Directors and a past chair.