A somewhat exaggerated model you could have for the US Securities and Exchange Commission under its current chair, Gary Gensler, is that Gensler wants to remake all of securities regulation all at once….
You could imagine the SEC’s staff loving this. “Finally, after years of not remaking securities regulation, we’ve got something exciting to do!” But it is easier, for me, to imagine most of the staff finding this very annoying. For one thing, they have worked there for a while, and they presumably have a certain fondness for existing securities regulation, a certain investment in it. When the new boss comes in and says “sorry, all of securities regulation is wrong, we’ve got to scrap it and start over,” it is hard for the staff not to hear that as an insult. That securities regulation is, in some sense, their securities regulation; they interpreted and enforced and defended those rules for years, and they wrote some of them. They took some pride in the system of securities regulation that they worked on every day. And now their boss says they were wasting their time.
Source: The SEC is Busy – Bloomberg
