President-elect Donald Trump on Wednesday chose a Wall Street attorney with experience in corporate mergers and public stock launches as his nominee to head the Securities and Exchange Commission.
Trump announced his nomination of Jay Clayton, a partner in the law firm Sullivan and Cromwell, as chairman of the independent agency that oversees Wall Street and the financial markets. If confirmed by the Senate, his responsibilities will include enforcing the scores of rules already written by the agency under the 2010 law that reshaped financial regulation after the 2008-09 crisis.
The law, known as Dodd-Frank, has long been scorned by Republicans and is high on Trump’s target list.
Clayton has worked on many of the securities deals that the SEC regulates and has represented Wall Street powerhouses including Goldman Sachs and Barclays.
He is the latest Trump choice with Wall Street connections. His nominee for Treasury secretary, Steven Mnuchin, is a former Goldman executive. Trump also has tapped Gary Cohn, until recently Goldman’s president, to be his top economic adviser, and billionaire investor Wilbur Ross to head the Commerce Department.
Clayton would succeed Mary Jo White, a former federal prosecutor who also had worked as a corporate attorney before being named SEC chair by President Barack Obama.
Clayton played a legal role in a raft of major deals. Some of the biggest came in the panicky days of 2008: He represented Goldman in billionaire Warren Buffett’s $5 billion investment in the Wall Street bank, and the teetering Bear Stearns in its rescue sale to JPMorgan Chase. He worked on a multitude of deals bringing companies public, notably the 2014 U.S. stock market debut of Chinese e-commerce giant Alibaba — the biggest IPO ever.
In announcing the appointment, Trump’s transition team said Clayton will encourage investment, “while providing strong oversight of Wall Street and related industries.”
“Robust accountability will be a hallmark of his tenure atop the SEC, and the financial security of the American people will be his top priority,” the statement said.
But some key Democrats were unimpressed with the choice of Clayton.
“It’s hard to see how an attorney who’s spent his career helping Wall Street beat the rap will keep President-elect Trump’s promise to stop big banks and hedge funds from ‘getting away with murder,'” said Sen. Sherrod Brown of Ohio, the senior Democrat on the Senate Banking Committee. The committee, with a Republican majority, will conduct Clayton’s confirmation hearing.
“I look forward to hearing how Mr. Clayton will protect retirees and savers from being exploited, demand real accountability from the financial institutions the SEC oversees, and work to prevent another financial crisis,” Brown said in a statement.
Trump will be able to put an even broader stamp on the SEC. In addition to Clayton, he’ll have a chance to name two of the other four commissioners. The five-member body has been down two since December 2015. Two candidates nominated by Obama to fill vacancies, one Democrat and one Republican, have been stalled in Congress over whether they support requiring publicly traded companies to disclose their political spending.
Rather than offer quick remedies, the complex Dodd-Frank legislation laid down prescriptions for regulators to flesh out. The SEC was responsible for writing a large chunk of the nearly 400 required rules. Overall, federal regulators have completed about 70 percent of the rules more than six years after Dodd-Frank became law.
With Trump in the White House and Republicans in control of Congress, a major overhaul of the law is expected, if not an outright dismantling. Republicans also have been pushing the SEC to ease the rules for smaller companies to raise capital in the markets — an area related to Clayton’s experience.
“We will carefully monitor our financial sector, as we set policy that encourages American companies to do what they do best: create jobs,” Clayton said in a statement.
The Associated Press contributed to this article.
Again with people who has the knowledge, skills and backgrounds in an important area. You can be sure democrats/liberals/ leftists are screaming that he is appointing more establishment. Strange and why didn’t their nothing president appoint skilled and knowledgeable people instead of a huge bundle of czars and no one of consequence. Ditto Hillary selecting Podast (I love misspelling his name) whose password was “password”. What a lack of intelligence over 8 years and they are complaining because we are getting REAL people appointed? Just goes to show we knew they were all weak-minded and had no clue as to how to even operate a computer!
I would like to see a return of the separation of traditional Banking from investment Banking. It seems that the tearing down of those walls is a large part of what happened with the Real Estate and economic Crash from 2006 – 2008. In the aftermath of that separation we ended up with about a half dozen mega-banks controlling so much market share that regional and smaller community banks were forced to merge or sell out, leaving way too much share and power with the mega banks, It seems as well, that, the concentration of mortgages being held by Freddie Mac and Fannie Mae and the securitization, or, bundling of mortgages for sale as investments were a primary cause as well. One more large causation was allowing insurance companies trading in “credit default swaps” to insure 10, 20, 30 times past their capitol reserves. These things tend to be major bundled risks in the hands of too few players, when looked at collectively. Huge complex laws like Dodd, Frank would not even be necessary if Banking, Investment, and Insurance were De-centralized and more competitive. “Too Big to Fail” is a perfect example of a situation that should never have been allowed to occur. What happened to Anti-Trust Laws, and Bankruptcy statutes? Rescuing Bankers, Mortgage Companies, and Insurance Companies IS NOT a proper role of government or the Tax Payers. The solutions are much simpler that “over regulation”. As the saying goes, Power corrupts, and absolute Power corrupts absolutely”..
He is a snake and can never be trusted he is loyal to the bankruptcy first and not his job no way if he is a BAR member no damn way, he is a trader and has sold us all down the river to hell.
The currency is the people not the money and this is about going home to Heaven buddy where the roads are paved in gold. Do not get lost in this subject matter already we are with you. But this is USURY evil yes a evil man if he has not broken his allegiance to thy Lucifer, THE FEDERAL RESERVE AND his children the Archon. He can never be trusted without sincere prayer and meditation with council as he is a part of evil.