The ongoing government shutdown reportedly hasn’t completely shut down the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC).
The regulator is still monitoring the markets for signs of manipulative behavior, SEC Chair Paul Atkins said in a Wednesday (Oct. 22) CNBC interview.
“Even during the shutdown, as we conduct our surveillance on the marketplace, we have stopped trading on eight foreign companies on Nasdaq that showed indicia of manipulative behavior — ramp and dump, we call it,” Atkins said.
“So we are monitoring the market for the behavior that indicates, you know, hanky-panky going on in the marketplace,” he added.
The commission, Atkins said, is searching for signs of suspicious trading activity, like sudden and unexplained jump in stock prices despite no news, or anomalous trading surrounding company announcements that could point to insider trading.
“We have a lot of different tools that we can use to analyze this, and we work closely with the self-regulatory organizations, the exchanges and so forth, because they are the immediate ones looking at their markets and doing surveillance over that,” he added.
Source: SEC Chair Says Regulation Continues Despite Shutdown