President-elect Donald Trump has tapped Jay Clayton to serve as US Attorney for Manhattan, leading the Justice Department office known as being the sheriff of Wall Street. The appointment, which was announced in a post by Trump on Truth Social, marks a potential shift to criminal law enforcement for Clayton, who led the US Securities and Exchange Commission during Trump’s…
Given the recent news about President-Elect Trump’s cabinet appointments, it is a safe bet that the SEC Division of Enforcement’s priorities will change under the new administration. Under President Biden, SEC Chair Gary Gensler pursued a broad and aggressive enforcement agenda, with critics contending that the SEC pursued regulation via enforcement in areas like crypto currencies and digital assets, ESG,…
Not every asset is a security. Former Chairman Clayton and I have both said that bitcoin is not a security, and the Commission has never treated bitcoin as a security. Our focus, rather, has been on some of the 10,000 or so other digital assets, many of which courts have ruled were offered or sold as securities. Putting this in…
The former FTX executive who wrote computer code that enabled his imprisoned former boss Sam Bankman-Fried to steal billions of dollars from cryptocurrency customers has built software to help the U.S. government uncover fraud in the stock market. Federal prosecutors made the disclosure in a Wednesday court filing seeking leniency for Gary Wang, FTX’s former chief technology officer, at his…
Major crypto exchange Coinbase has unveiled the Coinbase 50 Index (COIN50), a benchmark representing the top 50 digital assets listed on the exchange. These coins, per the announcement, must meet key criteria to qualify for inclusion in the benchmark. The fundamental criteria include token economics, blockchain architecture, and security. *** Head of institutional products at Coinbase Greg Tusar told Fortune…
Just think about it! You are an enterprising lawyer, you watch television news, you see a story that is like “Chipotle doesn’t put enough meat in burritos,” and you would like to turn that news item into several million dollars for yourself. How do you do it? The obvious victims of Chipotle’s actions here are the customers who pay $11.50…
Finally, regulation that defies common sense breeds cynicism. As one example among many, the Securities and Exchange Commission routinely extracts fines from financial companies for allowing their employees to converse on nonofficial channels, a practice that is all but unavoidable in the mobile communications era. A focus on changing incentives — so regulators are not rewarded for merely punishing businesses…
California was “absurd” to issue corporate emissions reporting requirements with national and international implications, instead of solely working on issues that only affect the state, like highway repairs, former SEC Chairman Jay Clayton said Wednesday. The state wasn’t “focusing on its own knitting” with its first-in-the-nation greenhouse gas emissions disclosure law in 2023, said Clayton, who led the Securities and…