Ferdinand Pecora (January 6, 1882 – December 7, 1971) was an American lawyer and judge who became famous in the 1930s as Chief Counsel to the United States Senate Committee on Banking and Currency during its investigation of Wall Street banking and stock brokerage practices.Ferdinand Pecora was appointed Chief Counsel to the U.S. Senate's Committee on Banking and Currency in January 1933, the last months of the Herbert Hoover presidency.  The Senate committee hearings that Pecora led probed the causes of the Wall Street Crash of 1929 that launched a major reform of the American financial system.Pecora's investigation unearthed evidence of irregular practices in the financial markets that benefited the rich at the expense of ordinary investors, including exposure of Morgan’s “preferred list” by which the bank’s influential friends (including Calvin Coolidge, the former president, and Owen J. Roberts, a justice of Supreme Court of the United States) participated in stock offerings at steeply discounted rates. He also revealed that National City sold off bad loans to Latin American countries by packing them into securities and selling them to unsuspecting investors, that Wiggin had shorted Chase shares during the crash, profiting from falling prices, and that Mitchell and top officers at National City had received $2.4 million in interest-free loans from the bank’s coffers.Spurred by these revelations, the United States Congress enacted the Glass–Steagall Act, the Securities Act of 1933 and the Securities Exchange Act of 1934. With the United States in the grips of the Great Depression, Pecora's investigations highlighted the contrast between the lives of millions of Americans in abject poverty and the lives of such financiers as J.P. Morgan, Jr.; under Pecora's questioning, Morgan and many of his partners admitted that they had paid no income tax in 1931 and 1932; they explained their failure to pay taxes by reference to their losses in the stock market's decline.After Pecora closed his investigations, on July 2, 1934, President Roosevelt appointed Ferdinand Pecora a Commissioner of the newly formed U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC).