Securities and Exchange Commission

Submitted by Pam Martens and Russ Martens via WallStreetOnParade.com,

Less than two weeks after Mary Jo White was nominated to become Chair of the Securities and Exchange Commission by President Barack Obama on January 24, 2013, White filed an ethics disclosure letter advising that she would “retire” from her position representing Wall Street banks at the law firm Debevoise & Plimpton. White wrote on this subject in great detail, stating:

Last May we reported that, after years of railing against Citadel's dominant position at the intersection of HFT trading and retail orderflow - Citadel was recently found to be the largest private US trading venue - Federal authorities were investigating the market-making arms of Citadel LLC and KCG Holdings looking into the possibility that the two giants of electronic trading are giving small investors a poor deal when executing stock transactions on their behalf.

Donald Trump is preparing to appoint another Wall Street proxy to the top Wall Street regulation, supervision and enforcement post. 

According to the WSJ, Wall Street M&A and IPO lawyer, Jay Clayton, is Trump's leading candidate to become chairman of the Securities and Exchange Commission and could be announced as the nominee as soon as Wednesday.

Via ConvergEx's Nick Colas,

Tell me truthfully: do you actually get a lot of value from quarterly earnings reports?  It’s not actually me asking; it is the Securities and Exchange Commission and the NIRI trade group, the most influential group of Investor Relations professionals in U.S. markets. 

 

Last week the SEC published a concept release that seeks public input on a range of issues, perhaps most notably quarterly financial reporting for public companies.

 

In a shocking development, earlier today a highly reputable executive with a just as reputable private equity firm was arrested and charged with securities fraud. Andrew Caspersen, a Harvard Law School graduate and a partner at the Park Hill Group, an advisory firm that up until last fall had been a part of the Blackstone Group and was recently spun off as Paul J. Taubman's PJT Partners, was accused of defrauding numerous institutional investors out of $95 million through fake private equity investments.