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Muriel “Mickie” Siebert’s secret to making a difference is, in her own words, to “take stands, take risks, and take responsibility.” It is a discipline that has driven her career since she left Cleveland, Ohio in 1954 for New York City in search of a job.

The New York Stock Exchange had intrigued her ever since she visited it with students years earlier, and to this day she still treasures a souvenir ticker tape that reads, “Welcome to the NYSE, Muriel Siebert.” But welcome she wasn’t when she was the first woman to seek a seat on the male-dominated NYSE.

Finding a sponsor for her application for a seat was daunting. On her tenth try, she found two brave men who agreed to help. After a run around by banks regarding her collateralized loan to buy the $445,000 seat, she borrowed $300,000 that was collateralized by the stocks she owned. She was sworn in on December 28, 1967.

A feisty competitor and shrewd businesswoman, Siebert was quick to master the art of institutional block trading. When the SEC mandated fully negotiated brokerage commissions on May 1, 1975, Siebert was early to sense the new direction on Wall Street and became one of the few NYSE members to serve as a discount broker.

In 1977, she was asked by New York Governor Hugh Carey to serve as superintendent of New York State’s banking department, overseeing 400 banks and $500 billion. The New York Times would go on to credit her tenure, noting that not since the Great Depression had a banking superintendent dealt with so many critical problems.

In 1982, Siebert returned to her old Wall Street firm and groomed it for future growth.

Today, she heads up publicly owned Muriel Siebert & Co. (NASDAQ: SIEB), doing business as an online broker but maintaining offices in New York, Beverly Hills, Jersey City, Boca Raton, Surfside, Naples, and West Palm Beach.

Through her foundation, she has enabled the contribution of millions of dollars to charities. While serving as Superintendent of Banks, she sensed the dire need for high school students to learn the basics of making informed decisions about money. Siebert then developed “Personal Finance Program: Taking Control of Your Financial Future,” now taught in many New York high schools.

Siebert holds 18 honorary doctoral degrees from universities and has published a candid account of her career in Changing the Rules: Adventures of a Wall Street Maverick. She spoke at length with us about her experiences on Wall Street and what can be done to bring it back to health.

EM: Growing up, did you ever imagine that you would achieve such national prominence?

Siebert: Absolutely not. Frankly, [my family] had many difficulties. My father was ill with cancer for three years. I was going to college, cutting class, and playing bridge because I couldn’t stand what I was seeing [at home]. I didn’t know what I was going to do when I grew up.

EM: But you eventually went to New York to find work?

Siebert: Yes, after being turned down by the United Nations and Merrill Lynch, I lied and said that I had a college degree to land my first job at Bache as a trainee in research. I didn’t have a business sense then, but I was given two industries where numbers were important: radio, television, and motion pictures and airlines. I looked at the balance sheets of the motion picture companies and thought, ‘You know, their totally depreciated films have got to have value for television.’ And I wrote my first report on that.

EM: How did your career progress from there?

Siebert: I was at Bache for almost three years, and then I went to Shields because it was rebuilding its research department, and I could be paid almost as much as the younger men who were coming right out of college. I was making $180 a week, which was a lot of money. What changed my life was Madison Fund calling me to say, ‘We made money on a report you wrote. We owe you an order.’ I was active in the New York Society of Security Analysts and started to bring in institutions. I used to volunteer at the Henry Street Settlement House, as did a lot of young people from Wall Street, right after work. One of the people I met there was with Finkle & Company, and I was asked to join Finkle as a partner. So I came in on a deal where I got a small piece of the firm and 40% of my commissions. And one day I made $20,000 in a day. That was money.

EM: Why then did you decide to go for a seat on the NYSE?

Siebert: Well, I had built up a very solid business based on my research, but I still wasn’t being paid equally. And I asked Jerry Tsai where I could go to be paid equally. His words to me were, ‘Don’t be ridiculous. You won’t. Buy a seat. Work for yourself.’ And I said, ‘Don’t you be ridiculous.’ And he said, ‘I don’t think there’s a law against it.’ So I took the NYSE constitution home, studied it, and thought, ‘I think I qualify.’ And that’s where the idea came from.

EM: You encountered a lot of hostility.

Siebert: I had difficulty finding a sponsor. I had to use an upstairs partner; no one from the floor would touch me, and no member would touch me. And the [NYSE] wanted a letter that they had never requested from a man before they would take my bid card. It was an ole boys club. For ten years, with the exception of 6 months, it was 1,365 men and me. There was a ladies room on the floor, held over from the Korean War when women were clerking, that no one told me about for two and a half years.

EM: Were you on the floor?

Siebert: Yes. I didn’t intend to be at first, but then the commission schedules changed. They started to discount. Somebody else was doing my clearing. And they didn’t discount the floor brokerage or the minimum clearing charges, so I was paying about two-thirds of my commissions on a block. And I thought, I’d better get registered so I can do my own floor brokerage, because I saw how that was affecting my earnings. So I spent my 30 days down there as a trainee with a badge and passed the floor test.

EM: How did you know then that discount brokerages would become popular?

Siebert: There were two laws coming in at the same time. One was the ability to negotiate rates and the other one was called ERISA, which was nicknamed ‘Everything Ridiculous Invented Since Adam.’ ERISA was a law that said if you were an institution or a fiduciary, you had to get the best execution at the lowest cost. And I realized that those two laws coming in simultaneously were going to change the business because if one or the other had come in, it would have been a non-event. But the two coming together meant a change in the industry.

EM: Though you discount, your firm offers additional services.

Siebert: Yes, online. Things have changed. Of our retail accounts, two-thirds use the Web. We also have large accounts that want to talk to a broker and want those orders worked. They’re not buying 300 shares on the Web. They’re bigger accounts, and they want the quality of the execution. We have a Capital Markets Group where we do corporate buybacks. We work orders for institutions. And we own 49% of Siebert Brandford Shank, which I’m proud of. They’re municipal bonds, and we’re now either number 15 or 16, I believe, in senior managing municipal bond deals.

EM: What do you think about today’s problems?

Siebert: The Street is changing now. Who would have thought two years ago that a Lehman would be out of business, that a Bear Stearns would be out of business, that a Merrill Lynch would be forced to sell? I can’t tell you where the Street will be in two years, but I can tell you some laws that probably should be addressed or practices.

EM: What should take top priority in that respect?

Siebert: We have to have the derivatives registered. I’m not saying regulated yet. The Street is going to change again, but you can’t have tens of trillions of dollars of credit default swaps where we don’t know who owns what. We need global securities regulations the same way we’ve had some global banking regulations. You can see the blocks of stocks at times just hitting the tape. And we scared the public. The public doesn’t trust us anymore. That’s not right.

EM: Do you think they’ve turned the investment community into a casino?

Siebert: Some of the new trading patterns are not conducive to what I call the purpose of the market. The original purpose of the market was to raise money for companies. If we looked around in the 1990s, every new product was U.S. made, the big ones, the ones that turned into major products. That’s not the same today.

I think we have to establish certain rules. You can’t let it be a speculator’s paradise. If you want people to buy stocks and put them in their 401(k)s and invest for the future in the market, then we have to change some of the rules. We need transparency. That’s the one thing that bothers me.

We have to know if a hedge fund owes 4 to 1, or 6 to 1, or 8 to 1. I’m not saying regulate them. You can’t regulate until you know the numbers, and we don’t know the numbers. They’re now maybe going to have, finally, a clearing way for derivatives. But we don’t know what’s out there and who owns them. Yet the derivatives are a very important part of today’s marketplace. So I think that the first thing we have to do is study—so we know who owns what and how much leverage. There’s nothing wrong with that.

EM: What happens on Wall Street when it reaches a level that’s self-destructive?

Siebert: They’ve done studies [that show how] money is power for men. A woman uses money to buy a specific thing; she will buy a house or educate her children. We can’t let this just go on. After the uptick rule went into effect, you could see these blocks of stocks hitting the short sell tape. There’s something wrong with that. It did happen at an opportune time for certain people, and it doesn’t make sense. And they can sit there in London where there are no margin requirements. We need global margin requirements. There’s no reason that a hedge fund can’t borrow enough money here. They go to London? And then they trade U.S. stocks on our markets?

EM: But they can trade overseas and do it over there without regulation, so why have a regulation here?

Siebert: Well, they can’t do it in the same value. They come to the board for that. It used to be that at 3:00, you’d see it hitting the tape, the sales, the blocks. When you can see these blocks, many short on downticks, there’s something wrong. I mean, when you can see the banks, they’ve got to think, what are the effects of these laws? They let the Glass-Steagall Act disappear because the banks got into the brokerage business, and the brokers got into the banking business. You can call it what you will, but that was exactly what happened.

EM: Was it good or bad that they did that?

Siebert: Well, they should have done that, but the new products had such an overlap that it could have been done with regulation or registration of some of these new products. The only one that I ever saw do a study on derivatives was the controller of currency that used to put a report out once a quarter that would list the major clearinghouse banks and what kind of derivatives they owned. And it’s sort of pathetic when they talk about the numbers. I’ve seen estimates ranging from $30 trillion to $70 trillion on credit default swaps. Shouldn’t we know who owns what and why? That’s registering it, and then you could pass regulations if needed.

EM: So in this environment, that can implode?

Siebert: Yeah. We don’t know where the stuff is. They’ve been trying to put together a clearing place for derivatives. And you need it. I want to see a study that says, of the oil that had been traded on the commodity exchanges, how much of it is speculation and how much of it is basic use for the oil itself? And what if you had two different margin requirements? If you’re an airline that’s buying gasoline, buying fuel, and a much higher margin—at least equal to what you borrow when you buy stocks—why should you be able to buy at 5% or a 6% margin? Why should you be able to speculate at this low rate? And how much of that low margin triggered all of the trading and volatility in oil?

EM: In 2004, the major brokerage firms met with the SEC to ask for a change in the net capital rule for brokerage firms, and it was granted. Did this contribute to today’s situation?

Siebert: Sure. Look, I believe they changed the capital. When I saw that one of the firms was leveraged 30 to 1, what kind of nonsense is that? Where’s the cushion? Everybody was lobbying for it because it meant they could borrow more and make more. Look, we never saw these kinds of bonuses or these earnings. And when the losses grew, they all stood in line to get government money.

EM: How does your personal finance program fit into your career crusades?

Siebert: I call it my soul. I saw when I was Superintendent of Banks how younger people were basically going broke. They would get a credit card, max it out; they’d get another one, they’d maxed that one out. They paid the minimum. They were basically going bankrupt, and their parents don’t know.

I [decided] that if I were ever in the position, I would change this. And it took me ten years to be in that position. I took the idea [of an educational personal finance program] to the City of New York. The archdiocese is putting it into 55 schools in the city. I have some other cities that are testing it. We can change people’s lives.

It explains basic things that these kids don’t know, like a checking account, the difference in cost between using a checking account and a check casher, the deductions from your paycheck, and an income tax return. We would not, in my opinion, have had the subprime mess if their parents had known these things.

EM: Do you think the current crisis will help you market your program?

Siebert: Absolutely. People are becoming very concerned about lack of knowledge. Some states are putting in laws that require personal financial literacy programs. I would like to see them pass a nationwide law [requiring] kids at school to have a certain basic personal financial knowledge.

EM: What is the Women’s Financial Network?

Siebert: We bought it years ago and [plan to] bring it up to date. Basic financial literacy has nothing to do with sex or race. It affects women the same way it affects men. [Historically], money was not a proper subject for ladies; they were told ‘your husband will take care of you.’ That’s not the case anymore. They have proven that at one time or another, 70% of the women have to take control of their own finances, or of their parents’ finances. Life has changed. Women need something that explains new products because today’s products are getting more complicated. Mortgages are getting more complicated.

EM: You’ve had a lot of accomplishments, many of them firsts. Looking back, what has been the most rewarding?

Siebert: I think the seat was very important. Being the first woman to regulate the banks in New York was a major step. And I think that if I can make the school program national, that will be the most important thing that I’ve done on a total basis because we can change millions of people’s lives.

EM: Are you glad you picked Wall Street?

Siebert: Oh sure, I don’t know what else I’d be doing. I can sit in a restaurant and I’ll get young women walking up to me and say, ‘I’m at Merrill Lynch, I’m at Goldman Sachs. Thank you for being there. You opened the door for us.’ That means a lot to me. I love the business, and there’s no other career I want. And I don’t regard the school program as a career. I regard it as an opportunity to pay back. I’ve come a long way, I’ve worked hard to do it, and I take great pride in it.