Around the globe, people seek some kind of connection to each other. I'm in the U.S., you are in the U.K., he is in Sweden, she is in Australia--what do we possibly have in common? Well, here's one thing: As far as I can tell, in 2009, people universally do not like their country's securities regulator.

Let's start with the U.S., where you know all about the SEC's problems. After completely whiffing on the Madoff case, the SEC's approval ratings sunk so far and so fast that by July 2009, it was viewed unfavorably by 55% of the public, exceeding even that of the Internal Revenue Service!

What about across the pond, where the U.K.'s Financial Services Authority is bring an unprecedented number of insider trading cases and criminal cases, and has issued a record amount of fines? Surely the FSA must be in the public's good graces? Hardly--in fact, the current plan of the Conservative party, which is reportedly favored to win the June 2010 elections, is to abolish the FSA altogether. The "Tories" would make the Bank of England responsible for regulating the financial services, which would "represent the most radical shake up of the regulation of the financial services industry in more than a decade."

How about Sweden? The latest reports from that country are that dissatisfaction with the Swedish National Economic Crimes Bureau has reached a level where one particularly high-profile case is now viewed as a "win-or-die" situation for the regulator. "Without any convictions in this case will it be hard for the government not to pull the plug," the Stockholm News reports.

As far as I can tell, however, Australia's ASIC (the Australian Securities and Investments Commission) may be the global leader now in terms of public disapproval. The ASIC's embarrassing loss last month in its 8-year-old case against Jodee Rich was labeled by the financial press as a “crushing defeat” and a “monumental, utterly unqualified catastrophe." Others added that a “sick ASIC should be put out of its misery” and disbanded altogether. That was apparently just a warmup to the defeat the ASIC suffered this week, when Australia's Federal Court dismissed all 22 of ASIC's allegations against billionaire Andrew "Twiggy" Forrest and his company, Fortescue Metals Group. The court ordered ASIC to pay Forrest's and Fortescue's costs, which could amount to millions of dollars, and stated that ASIC had no basis for the civil proceedings in the first place.

ASIC's "comprehensive towelling" by the court in the Forrest case has led to another round of extreme bashing, with the press describing the commission using words such as "incompetent," "embarrassing" and "bull-headed buffoonery," and inventing new twists on the "ASIC" acronym (such as "Australia's Simply Ineffective (corporate) Cop").

So at this special time of the year, realize that in at least some small ways, we're really not all that different from one other.

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