As a former senior trial counsel at the Securities and Exchange Commission, I am annoyingly familiar with criticism regarding the agency’s choice of targets. In my era at the SEC, criticism shifted from protests that the agency focused mostly on companies for wrongdoing—ignoring the culpable executives at those companies—to complaints that individuals were unfairly blamed for larger corporate failures.

But one evergreen grumble is that the SEC under Chairman Gary Gensler targets smaller entities, leaving the larger financial services firms alone—leading to calls for the SEC to more aggressively investigate and prosecute misconduct by the largest firms.