After graduating from Saint Thomas Academy in Mendota Heights, Minnesota in 1970, Cox earned a Bachelor of Arts degree the University of Southern California in 1973, following an accelerated three-year course.

He still has two metal screws in his back, and according to a 2005 Fortune magazine profile, “has been in pain every day for the past 27 years.”[5] Since he can't sit for extended periods of time, he has a special desk that allows him to work while standing.

[8] His 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.

[9] In 1986, following Chief Justice Warren Burger's confidential message to President Reagan that he planned to step down from the bench, White House Counsel Peter Wallison tasked a small team including Cox with thoroughly researching the opinions and judicial philosophies of the leading candidates for the next Supreme Court nomination.

He is a very good lawyer," and his willingness to give up his partnership in a prestigious law firm to join the White House staff only a year before had made an impression.

[15][12] Coincidentally, eight months prior to the crash, Chief of Staff Howard Baker had asked Cox to write a detailed memo describing the emergency powers that the President might exercise in a market crisis.

That landed Cox in an emergency meeting in the chief of staff's office on Black Monday, from which Baker called then-NYSE Chairman John Phelan to urge him to drop his plan to shut down the New York Stock Exchange.

[1] Early in his congressional career, 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.

With U.S. Rep. Barney Frank (D-MA) as his chief co-sponsor, Cox authored legislation in 1997 to privatize the National Helium Reserve, which was then $1.4 billion in debt to taxpayers.

[24] Cox also 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.

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.

[39] Under Cox the SEC wrote new rules requiring the $10.6 trillion mutual fund industry to make their prospectuses easier for investors to read, understand, and access.

[44] Working with the Public Company Accounting Oversight Board, the SEC under Cox replaced the original auditing standard for Section 404 with a streamlined, more cost-effective version,[45] and also provided new guidance for management intended to reduce unnecessary costs.

[46] At Cox's direction the agency undertook a nationwide Small Business Cost-Benefit Study[47] to determine whether, as intended, the new auditing standard and management guidance had made compliance less expensive and better focused the 404 process on control elements that truly matter for companies of all sizes.

[50] The study found that the rule—which had never applied on NASDAQ or to ECNs and other trading systems—had been rendered ineffective on the NYSE due to decimalization (that is, the reduction of the "tick" increment to a penny, as compared to the 1/8 or 12½¢ that was in effect when the rule was adopted in 1938).

On July 15, 2008, Cox told a U.S. 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.

[57] The new system was designed to let future investors easily search, sort, and recombine information to generate reports and analysis from hundreds of thousands of companies and millions of forms.

[64] A nationwide sweep examination conducted by the SEC and authorities in seven states found that "free lunch" investment seminars, which draw large numbers of retirees, routinely involved significant fraud.

But neither these investments, nor the sales agents, were registered with state or federal securities regulators—and investors were frequently unaware that it would be impossible to get their money back for as much as 15 years without paying a stiff penalty.

Between 2005 and 2008, 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.

[70] Cox also 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.

[77] Among the significant international cases the Commission brought during this period were the highly publicized 2008 charges against Hong Kong-based insider trading in Dow Jones prior to its acquisition by News Corporation.

[81] He moved quickly to settle the debate over whether it was legitimate to impose penalties on corporations, adopting a policy that made clear the SEC "isn't turning out to be the corporate-friendly place that many in the boardroom set were hoping for.

[95] A few weeks later, in May 2008, the new Office began sending more than $800 million in Fair Funds to harmed investors in American International Group, Inc. (AIG), which settled SEC charges of financial fraud.

[105] 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, 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.

[117] The SEC immediately commenced a rulemaking which concluded on December 3, 2008, with approval of a series of measures to regulate the conflicts of interests, disclosures, internal policies, and business practices of credit rating agencies.

The regulations were intended to ensure that firms provide more meaningful ratings and greater disclosure to investors concerning collateralized debt obligations and residential mortgage-backed securities.

[118] In an interview with The Washington Post in late December 2008, Cox said, "What we have done in this current turmoil is stay calm, which has been our greatest contribution—not being impulsive, not changing the rules willy-nilly, but going through a very professional and orderly process that takes into account unintended consequences and gives ample notice to market participants."

"[119] In a December 2008 interview with Reuters, he explained that the SEC's Office of Economic Analysis was still evaluating data from the temporary ban, and that preliminary findings pointed to several unintended market consequences and side effects.

[130] He is a life trustee of the University of Southern California[131] and a member of the advisory boards of New York-based Blue Flame AI[132] and the Loker Hydrocarbon Research Institute, founded by Nobel Prize winner George A.