WASHINGTON — Days after the Securities and Exchange Commission secured a $550 million settlement from the banking giant Goldman Sachs, the agency’s chairwoman said Tuesday that the S.E.C. was pursuing several other investigations related to the 2008 financial crisis.
The chairwoman, Mary L. Schapiro, told reporters after a Congressional hearing that the S.E.C. had “a number of cases coming out of the financial crisis related to C.D.O.’s and other products” and involving Wall Street firms, banks and other financial institutions.
C.D.O.’s, or collateralized debt obligations, were the financial product at the center of the S.E.C.’s complaint, which accused Goldman Sachs of misleading investors in a subprime mortgage product as the housing market began to collapse.
Ms. Schapiro’s comments were the most direct signal yet that the S.E.C. was continuing to press for accountability and restitution related to the upheaval in financial and housing markets in 2007 and 2008, developments that were the catalyst for the sweeping regulatory overhaul that President Obama was expected to sign into law on Wednesday.
The S.E.C. has been criticized by lawmakers, investor groups and others for what has been characterized as a lack of visible enforcement cases against firms at the center of the financial crisis, which cost individual and institutional investors billions of dollars.
But Ms. Schapiro defended the commission’s record, saying the enforcement division had been restructured and reinvigorated since she took over as chairwoman in January 2009.
“We have investigations in the pipeline across products, across institutions coming out of the financial crisis,” she said. “We’ve brought a number of them. Nobody ever wants to pay attention to the ones we’ve already brought. But we’ve brought quite a few already coming out of crisis over the last year and a half.”
Asked if investors had already seen the bulk of the cases that might stem from the crisis, Ms. Schapiro replied, “Not necessarily.”
She said that the inquiries also involved other types of financial products, as well as possible fraud by banks that received financing under the Troubled Asset Relief Program, or TARP.
