Securities And Exchange Commission Quotes

I am noticing a big difference in the way the hospital workers are looking at me as I approach Jess’s room. The look of sincere sympathy that used to be on their faces when they made eye contact with me is gone. It has been replaced by shear helplessness as they quickly walk past me with their heads tilted down and to the right. I feel like Bud Fox walking into his office with the Securities and Exchange Commission awaiting him.

an official with the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission learned I was writing about specialization and contacted me to make sure I knew that specialization had played a critical role in the 2008 global financial crisis. “Insurance regulators regulated insurance, bank regulators regulated banks, securities regulators regulated securities, and consumer regulators regulated consumers,” the official told me. “But the provision of credit goes across all those markets. So we specialized products, we specialized regulation, and the question is, ‘Who looks across those markets?’ The specialized approach to regulation missed systemic issues.

THE NEW DEAL didn’t transform the Constitution only by institutionalizing nine unelected judges with lifetime tenure as a permanent constitutional convention, turning Woodrow Wilson’s theory into hard reality. It also allowed Congress to create, at the president’s request and with the blessing of the Court, an unprecedented regulatory state, made up of a constellation of administrative agencies—from the Federal Housing Administration and the Federal Communications Commission to the National Labor Relations Board and the Securities and Exchange Commission—that make rules, enforce them, and adjudicate transgressions of them.

While I was researching this book, an official with the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission learned I was writing about specialization and contacted me to make sure I knew that specialization had played a critical role in the 2008 global financial crisis. “Insurance regulators regulated insurance, bank regulators regulated banks, securities regulators regulated securities, and consumer regulators regulated consumers,” the official told me. “But the provision of credit goes across all those markets. So we specialized products, we specialized regulation, and the question is, ‘Who looks across those markets?’ The specialized approach to regulation missed systemic issues.

Less than three months later, the walls began closing in again: on March 14, 2018, the Securities and Exchange Commission charged Theranos, Holmes, and Balwani with conducting “an elaborate, years-long fraud.” To resolve the agency’s civil charges, Holmes was forced to relinquish her voting control over the company, give back a big chunk of her stock, and pay a $500,000 penalty. She also agreed to be barred from being an officer or director in a public company for ten years. Unable to reach a settlement with Balwani, the SEC sued him in federal court in California. In the meantime, the criminal investigation continued to gather steam. As of this writing, criminal indictments of both Holmes and Balwani on charges of lying to investors and federal officials seem a distinct possibility.

Still, one could argue—and many did—that Greenspan, at least, had no business being quite so shocked. Over the years, countless people had challenged his deregulatory dogma, including (to name just a few) Joseph Stiglitz and Paul Krugman, both Nobel Prize–winning economists, and Brooksley Born, who was head of the Commodity Futures Trading Commission from 1996 to 1999. Born eventually became something of a Cassandra figure for the crisis, since she repeatedly called for regulating the market for derivatives, those ultracomplex financial products that eventually helped bring down the economy. Those calls were silenced when Greenspan, along with then-Treasury Secretary Robert Rubin and then-Securities and Exchange Commission Chair Arthur Levitt, took the extraordinary step of convincing Congress to pass legislation forbidding Born’s agency from taking any action for the duration of her term.

We were supposed to keep tabs on the institutions as a whole, but by law we had to defer to the primary supervisor, in those cases the OCC for their commercial banks and the Securities and Exchange Commission for their investment banks. The Fed also shared responsibility for the U.S. affiliates of foreign banks with state regulators, as well as home-country supervisors in London, Zurich, Frankfurt, and around the world. These divisions of labor evoked the parable of the blind men and the elephant, with nobody accountable for seeing the full picture of a corporation, much less the interconnections of the entire system. This glut of watchdogs with overlapping

Senator Warren questions SEC chair on broker reforms 525 words By Sarah N. Lynch WASHINGTON (Reuters) - Senator Elizabeth Warren said Friday that the Labor Department should press ahead with brokerage industry reforms, and not be deterred by the Securities and Exchange Commission's plans to adopt its own separate rules.    President Barack Obama, with frequent Wall Street critic Warren at his side, last month called on the Labor Department to quickly move forward to tighten brokerage standards on retirement advice, lending new momentum to a long-running effort to implement reforms aimed at reducing conflicts of interest and "hidden fees." But that effort could be complicated by a parallel track of reforms by the SEC, whose Chair Mary Jo White on Tuesday said she supported moving ahead with a similar effort to hold retail brokers to a higher "fiduciary" standard. "I want to see the Department of Labor go forward now," Warren told Reuters in an interview Friday. "There is no reason to wait for the SEC. There is no question that the Department of Labor has the authority to act to ensure that retirement advisers are serving the best interest of their clients." Warren said that while she has no concerns with the SEC moving forward to write its own rules, she fears its involvement may give Wall Street a hook to try to delay or water down a separate ongoing Labor Department effort to craft tough new rules governing how brokers dole out retirement advice. She also raised questions about White's decision to unveil her position at a conference hosted by the Securities Industry and Financial Markets Association (SIFMA), a trade group representing the interests of securities brokerage firms. Not only is the SEC the lead regulator for brokers, but unlike the Labor Department, it is also bound by law to preserve brokers' commission-based compensation in any new fiduciary rule.     "I was surprised that (Chair) White announced the rule at a conference hosted by an industry trade group that spent several years and millions of dollars lobbying members of Congress to block real action to fix the problem," Warren said. Warren, a Massachusetts Democrat who frequently challenges market regulators as too cozy with industry, stopped short of directly criticizing White. The SEC and SIFMA both declined to comment on Warren's comments. SIFMA has strongly opposed the Labor Department's efforts, fearing its rule will contain draconian measures that would cut broker profits, and in turn, force brokers to pull back from offering accounts and advice to American retirees. It has long advocated for the SEC to take the lead on a rule that would create a new uniform standard of care for brokers and advisers. The SEC has said it has been coordinating with the Labor Department on the rule-writing effort, but on Tuesday White also acknowledged that the two can still act independently of one another because they operate under different laws. The industry and reform advocates have been waiting now for years to see whether the SEC would move to tighten standards.     Warren expressed some skepticism on Friday about whether the SEC will ever in fact actually adopt a rule, saying that for years the agency has talked about taking action, but has not delivered. (Reporting by Sarah N. Lynch; Editing by Christian Plumb)

The Securities and Exchange Commission was created in 1934, and, together with other checks and balances (including class-action suits), it helped build a sense of professional ethics among managers, auditors, and other market participants, leading to the creation of a securities market of unprecedented size, with unprecedented participation. At the peak of the market in March 2000, the market capitalization of U.S. stocks (as measured by the Wilshire index) was $17 trillion, or 1.7 times the value of American GDP. Half of all U.S. households owned equities. The world has changed a great deal, however, over the past sixty years. New forms of deception have been developed. In the go-go environment of the nineties while market values soared, human values eroded, and the playing field became terribly unlevel once again, contributing to the bubble that burst soon after the beginning of the new millennium. The

Regulators lent a helping hand. On a spring afternoon in late April 2004, five members of the Securities and Exchange Commission gathered in a basement hearing room to meet a contingent of representatives from Wall Street’s big investment banks to talk about risk. The banks had asked for an exemption for their brokerage units from a regulation that limited the amount of debt they could hold on their balance sheets. The rule required banks to hold a large reserve of cash as a cushion against big losses on those holdings. By loosening up these so-called capital reserve requirements, the banks could become more aggressive and deploy the extra cash in other, more lucrative areas—such as mortgage-backed securities and derivatives.

If bankruptcy were on a level playing field, CEOs would not be permitted to sock away generous executive pay out of the reach of a bankruptcy judge. If enforcement of these building blocks were not tilted toward CEOs, presumably the Securities and Exchange Commission would bar CEOs from pumping up share prices through buybacks and then cashing in their options, as the SEC once did. Moreover, CEO pay in excess of $1 million would not be deductible, even if linked to performance. If all the building blocks were not tilted toward large corporations, these companies would not be earning the substantial profits that have allowed their top executives to earn princely sums to begin with.

While Immelt said that he encouraged debate, meetings often lacked rigorous questioning. One executive recalled being in a board meeting in which Keith Sherin was presenting the quarterly financial results to the group. The Power business had missed badly, but little specific detail was provided on what went wrong. This executive braced for the reaction from the directors, but it never came—none of them asked what went wrong. When Flannery committed to renewing and shrinking the board of directors, it included half a dozen current or former CEOs, the former head of mutual fund giant Vanguard Group, the dean of New York University’s business school, as well as a former chair of the Securities and Exchange Commission. The seventeen independent directors got a mix of cash, stock, and other perks worth more than $300,000 a year. The terms had been even more generous when GE still made appliances; the company allowed directors to take home up to $30,000 worth of GE products in any three-year period. The company matched the directors’ gifts to charity, and upon leaving the board, a director could send $1 million in GE money to a charity. Some directors admitted to having been sold by Immelt’s sweeping optimism, even if they knew he wasn’t the best deal-maker. But they knew he had a hard job, was playing with a tough hand, and had survived multiple major crises. Plus, they liked him. Immelt said that he did his best to keep directors informed, noting that he required them to make trips to GE divisions on their own, but he also knew that the complexity of the business limited their input. As they’d done under Welch, the board usually tended to approve his recommendations and follow his lead. Some felt that Immelt manipulated the board, and it was whispered that members were chosen and educated to see the company through his visionary eyes. There was concern that the board didn’t entirely understand how GE worked, and that Immelt was just fine with that. Like many CEOs who are also their company’s chairman, he made sure that his board was aligned with him.

As I was researching the criminal act’s I noticed that there was a Securities and Exchange (SEC) Whistleblower Program. The SEC claims that their function as a government agency is the following: “The mission of the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission is to protect investors, maintain fair, orderly, and efficient markets, and facilitate capital formation. As more and more first-time investors turn to the markets to help secure their futures, pay for homes, and send children to college, our investor protection mission is more compelling than ever. As our nation’s securities exchanges mature into global for-profit competitors, there is even greater need for sound market regulation.

Questionable investment deals certainly contributed to a number of municipal financial crises that occurred after the 2008 stock market crash. Jefferson County, Alabama, for example, entered into interest rate swaps that helped swell its debt burden to $3 billion when interest rates collapsed. The county sued the lead underwriter, J.P. Morgan, on the grounds that it misled the county and investors. The Securities and Exchange Commission also imposed significant penalties on the underwriter in 2009. Detroit similarly entered swaps that the bankruptcy court ultimately settled for much less than their face value after the bankruptcy judge raised significant questions about the swaps' legality and enforceability.

In 1980, the Securities and Exchange Commission caused considerable damage to mutual-fund shareholder interests by permitting mutual funds to pay for marketing and distribution expenses directly from fund assets.

The US Securities and Exchange Commission is a tough regulator. It goes through every document with a fine-tooth comb. Every claim in an offer document has to have supporting evidence and one cannot make a forward-looking statement. If one does, the Commission will ask a company to explain why.

Public companies, which sell stock on the open market, must file a series of reports with the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) each year if they have at least 500 investors or at least $10 million in assets. Smaller companies that have incorporated and sold stock must report to the state in which they incorporated, but they aren't required to file with the SEC. You can find more details about the SEC's reporting requirements for public companies in Chapters 3 and 19.

On March 31, 2016, Securities and Exchange Commission chair Mary Jo White said this to the students of Stanford Law School: Nearly all venture valuations are highly subjective. But, one must wonder whether the publicity and pressure to achieve the unicorn benchmark is analogous to that felt by public companies to meet projections they make to the market with the attendant risk of financial reporting problems. And, yes that remains a problem. We continue to see instances of public companies and their senior executives manipulating their accounting to meet various expectations and projections.1 We have reached a point in the world of technology startups where the fervor for building a company with a billion-dollar valuation — the elusive startup unicorn — is overshadowing the creation of real value. It is not the first time we have been here; the world of startups and venture capital has always run in cycles, from optimistic zeal to caution to post-catastrophe introspection and back again. But perhaps it is time that entrepreneurs and investors alike begin waking up to the fact that the “valuation-at-all-costs” model, with its relentless pressure, remote odds of success, and human cost, is not only unsustainable but bad business. At this point in the current cycle, the radically overvalued startup appears to be headed for the endangered species list. That is a good thing. While billion-dollar behemoths will always exist, and the high-wire act of chasing scale while also chasing the cash to fund that scale will occasionally produce a solid company, there are other ways to build a business. There are better ways to build a business.

called for the repeal of all campaign-finance laws and the abolition of the Federal Election Commission (FEC). It also favored the abolition of all government health-care programs, including Medicaid and Medicare. It attacked Social Security as “virtually bankrupt” and called for its abolition, too. The Libertarians also opposed all income and corporate taxes, including capital gains taxes, and called for an end to the prosecution of tax evaders. Their platform called for the abolition too of the Securities and Exchange Commission, the Environmental Protection Agency, the FBI, and the CIA, among other government agencies.

According to their filings with the Securities and Exchange Commission, most for-profit insurance companies maintain a medical loss ratio of about 80 percent, which is to say that 20 cents of every dollar people pay in premiums for health insurance doesn’t buy any health care.

Feinstein has been a China-booster from the early 1990s, often backing pro-Beijing legislation in the Senate. Her husband has strong business links in China, which she denies have had any influence on her. In 1997 she compared the Tiananmen Square massacre to the shooting of four students at Ohio’s Kent State University in 1970, and called for a joint US–China commission on the two nations’ human rights records.35 Lowe left Feinstein’s office after the FBI warned her about him. China’s intelligence agencies also target Westerners not of Chinese heritage for information-gathering. In 2017 a long-serving State Department employee, Candace Claiborne, was indicted for accepting money and gifts from Chinese agents in exchange for diplomatic and economic information.36 She had been targeted by the MSS’s Shanghai State Security Bureau after she asked a Chinese friend to find a job in China for a family member. Claiborne maintained secret contact with MSS agents for five years, supplying them with information in return for help with her ‘financial woes’. She was sentenced to forty months in prison. In the early 1990s Britain’s MI5 wrote a protection manual for businesspeople visiting China; the advice remains relevant today: ‘Be especially alert for flattery and over-generous hospitality … [Westerners] are more likely to be the subject of long-term, low key cultivation, aimed at making “friends” … The aim of these tactics is to create a debt of obligation on the part of the target, who will eventually find it difficult to refuse inevitable requests for favours in return.

With stage two also having failed, we enacted stage three of our plan to stop Potanin. It was a desperate play, and if I didn’t succeed I wasn’t sure what I would do or how my business would survive. This last effort started with a meeting with Dmitry Vasiliev, chairman of the Russian Federal Securities and Exchange Commission (FSEC).

An even earlier example was the rise of dark pool stock trading. In 1979, the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) instituted Rule 19c3, which allowed stocks listed on one exchange, such as the New York Stock Exchange (NYSE), to be traded off-exchange. Many large institutions moved their trading large blocks to these dark pools, where they traded peer to peer with far lower costs than traditional exchange-based trading.

Nobody, except for one firm: Salomon Brothers. In 1991, just as Maxwell had generated a huge scandal in Britain, Salomon Bothers had done the same in the United States. In the previous autumn, the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) caught some top Salomon traders trying to manipulate the US Treasury bond market.

Once the Bermuda regulatory details were under control, Morgan Stanley would need to arrange with at least one of the ratings agencies to receive an investment-grade rating for the new Bermuda company’s bonds. There are two primary ratings agencies, Moody’s Investor Services and Standard and Poor’s, and numerous secondary agencies. I always found Moody’s analysts to be more intelligent and creative than analysts at any other agency. However, when you really needed a rating, there was only one choice: Standard and Poor’s, known as S&P. It might surprise you that private entities can pay for their credit ratings. Most people assume that credit rating agencies are principled and accurate, and that S&P in particular is above reproach because it is at least partially accountable to the federal government. Certainly S&P and Moody’s Investors Services are two of the premiere ratings agencies in the United States, and the Securities and Exchange Commission regulates each as a Nationally Recognized Statistical Ratings Organization. However, it’s also true that although ratings agencies once provided information about particular debt issues without charging the issuer of the debt, today—and for the past two decades—such agencies have been collecting credit rating fees from issuers, simply for telling investors what credit rating they assign that issuer’s debt. A rating isn’t cheap, either. Fees typically range from $30,000 on up, more for large and complicated deals such as PLUS Notes. Because S&P also had to preserve its reputation, for some deals you simply could not buy a rating. For a while these Bermuda bonds appeared to be one of those deals, and it looked as if Morgan Stanley might not be able to obtain an investment-grade rating at any price.

Just before the April 12 losses, members of the Securities and Exchange Commission repeatedly had warned of the potential for disaster. Commissioner Carter Beese had cautioned that the “clock is ticking” for the derivatives market, citing Bankers Trust’s 1993 annual report, which listed derivatives positions of almost $2 trillion. Commissioner Richard Roberts expressed concern that “some derivative products are being marketed more for the fat profit margin they make available to the securities firm than for their suitability to the customer.

1982, shortly after John Shad, a banker who was inspired by the Chicago economists, became chairman of the Securities and Exchange Commission, he loosened a limit that had been in place since the 1930s, which prevented companies from boosting their stock price by buying stock off the open market. Shad instituted esoteric-sounding Rule 10b-18, which cleared the way for stock “buybacks.

With the first banks opened on Monday, the afternoon brought another request from Roosevelt. Stating that he needed the tax revenue, he asked Congress that beer with alcohol content of up to 3.2 percent be made legal; the Eighteenth Amendment did not specify the percentage that constituted an intoxicating beverage. Congress complied. The House passed the bill the very next day with a vote count of 316–97, pushing it to the Senate. Wednesday brought good cheer: The stock market opened for the first time in Roosevelt’s presidency. In a single-day record, the Dow Jones Industrial Average gained over 15 percent—a gain in total market value of $3 billion. By Thursday, for increased fiscal prudence, the Senate had added an exemption for wine to go with beer, but negotiated the alcohol content down to 3.05 percent. Throughout the week, banks were receiving net deposits rather than facing panicked withdrawals. Over the following weeks, the administration developed a sweeping farm package designed to “increase purchasing power of our farmers” and “relieve the pressure of farm mortgages.” To guarantee the safety of bank deposits, the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation was created. To regulate the entire American stock and bond markets, the Exchange Act of 1933 required companies to report their financial condition accurately to the buying public, establishing the Securities and Exchange Commission. Safety nets such as Social Security for retirement and home loan guarantees for individuals would be added to the government’s portfolio of responsibilities within a couple of years. It was the largest peacetime escalation of government in American history.

The Banking Act of 1933, also known as Glass-Steagall, regulated the stock market, separated securities dealers from banks, and established the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC). Though the SEC regulated many securities markets, government securities were considered exempt. That meant that federal securities laws did not apply. The thinking at the time was to let those markets operate free of government regulation, which would allow the Treasury and municipalities to sell debt at a lower cost. Oh, and one more thing. There was a clause known as Regulation Q, which prohibited banks from paying interest on savings accounts.

In the United States, three organizations are particularly important in establishing accounting principles—the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC), the Financial Accounting Standards Board (FASB), and the International Accounting Standards Board (IASB).

His path was in some ways traditional—Stanford to Stanford Law to judicial clerkship to high-powered law firm—but it was also marked by bouts of rebellion. At Stanford he created and published a radical conservative journal called The Stanford Review, then he wrote a book that railed against multiculturalism and “militant homosexuals” on campus, despite being both gay and foreign born. His friends thought he might become a political pundit. Instead he became a lawyer. Then one day, surprising even himself, he walked out of one of the most prestigious securities law firms in the world, Sullivan & Cromwell, after seven months and three days on the job. Within a few short years, Thiel formed and then sold PayPal, an online payments company, to eBay for $ 1.5 billion in July 2002, the month that Nick Denton registered the domain for his first site, Gizmodo. With proceeds of some $ 55 million, Thiel assembled an empire. He retooled a hedge fund called Clarium into a vehicle to make large, counterintuitive bets on global macro trends, seeding it with $ 10 million of his own money. In 2003, Thiel registered a company called Palantir with the Securities and Exchange Commission. In 2004, he would found it in earnest. The company would take antifraud technology from PayPal and apply it to intelligence gathering—fighting terrorism, predicting crime, providing military insights. It would take money from the venture capital arm of the CIA and soon take on almost every other arm of the government as clients.