Three recent and well known high-profile failures at the SEC and books or articles covering them:

0. Enron - Senate committee concludes Enron was enabled by a systemic and catastrophic failure at the SEC[0]. Smartest Guys in the Room[1] is one of the better books about it

1. No One Would Listen - book from Madoff whistleblower Harry Markopolos[2]. He spent years laying out the entire Madoff case for the SEC yet their investigators kept signing off on Madoff. He has a lot of good detail on why the SEC are a bad regulator.

2. Financial Crisis - SEC chairman concedes the oversight program was fatally flawed in monitoring Bear Sterns and other hedge funds[3] - plenty of books on crisis, "After the Music Stopped" was good[4]

[0] https://www.wsj.com/articles/SB1033944629262271233

[1] https://www.amazon.com/Smartest-Guys-Room-Amazing-Scandalous...

[2] https://www.amazon.com/No-One-Would-Listen-Financial/dp/0470...

[3] http://www.nytimes.com/2008/09/27/business/27sec.html?mcubz=...

[4] https://www.amazon.com/After-Music-Stopped-Financial-Respons...

End to End exploration and explanation of how and why global economy works. - Peter Dicken, Global Shift https://uk.sagepub.com/en-gb/eur/global-shift/book242137

Any corporate finance textbook, probably; Brearly Myers, Corporate Finance, https://www.amazon.com/Principles-Corporate-Finance-Richard-...

Watch the Yale/Stanford lectures opencourseware on Financial Markets with Schiller; http://oyc.yale.edu/economics/econ-252-11

Nicholas Taleb, Black Swan; https://www.amazon.com/Black-Swan-Improbable-Robustness-Frag...

Harry Markopolos, Nobody Would Listen, https://www.amazon.com/No-One-Would-Listen-Financial/dp/0470...

Michael Lewis, Liars Poker, https://www.amazon.com/Liars-Poker-Norton-Paperback-Michael/...

"Leveraged Sellout", Damn It Feels Good To Be A Banker, https://www.amazon.com/Damn-Feels-Good-Be-Banker/dp/14013096...

Unfortunately, the opposite is much more common: people who start out as regulators move to the other side. Sure, high level positions like the Treasury Secretary and his staff will often have people from industry. But rank-and-file regulators are, as I understand it, often not from industry.

Harry Markopolous has an excellent book, "No One Would Listen" (http://www.amazon.com/No-One-Would-Listen-Financial/dp/04705...) about how he warned regulators multiple times about Madoff. In the book, he explains how good regulators often end up going to industry because the pay and prestige is much, much better. So, what you're left with are the people who couldn't hack it in industry, which means the regulators are continually going to be outgunned.

That the SEC investigators were completely incompetent helped him far more. See Harry Markopolos' book "No One Would Listen" for support of my "completely incompetent" claim: http://www.amazon.com/No-One-Would-Listen-Financial/dp/04709...