Listen up, people. I know you've come to expect the Securities and Exchange commission to be on top of its *** and not completely worthless, but Mary Schapiro needs you to know that it's almost a certainty that the regulator will be unable to uphold the standard it's historically brought to the table. Why? 'Cause financial journalists are getting laid off. And that's a problem for the SEC because the business model it's been following is to 1) read an article about a possible scam in, say, the Journal and then 2) go to work. Or, you know, read about a possible scam and then do nothing. Either way! The bottom line is, despite the fact that Twitter is going to go a long way in improving the SEC's ability to crime-bust, you should recalibrate your expectations of what the agency is capable of ASAP.

Mary Schapiro, America's new top cop for the securities industry, said the current mass culling of journalists' jobs is a concern because it could reduce the number of leads that regulators get as they seek to crack down on nefarious behavior.

"It's an absolute worry for me because I think financial journalists have in many cases been the sources of some really important enforcement cases and really important discovery of practices and products that regulators should be profoundly concerned about," the chairman of the Securities and Exchange Commission told the Reuters Global Financial Regulation Summit in Washington on Tuesday.

"But for journalists having been dogged and determined and really pursuing some of these things, they might not be known to the regulators or they might not be known for a long time," she said.

SEC's Schapiro says journalist job cuts worrying [Reuters]