"12 Unprecedented SEC Reforms" to Expect From Incoming SEC Chair Paul Atkins

12 Unprecedented SEC Reforms to Expect During the First 100 Days of SEC Chair Paul Atkins

Having served at the SEC for almost 20 years and as Chief of the Office of Internet Enforcement of the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) during the entirety of the term of former SEC Commissioner Paul Atkins (August 8, 2002 – August 1, 2008), my take is that Paul Atkins might become the greatest SEC Chair in US history.

While I may disagree with his stances on the regulation of digital assets, Paul Atkins is an honorable individual and a steadfast patriot who, as the 32nd SEC Chair, will lead with fairness, honesty, transparency and accountability.

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Gleaned from Atkins’s own words, as set forth in the sacred text of the 2008 Atkins/Bondi tome, below are the 12 most likely reforms (in no particular order) that SEC Chair Atkins will implement, execute and politely shove down the throats of the SEC staff.

Accounting errors force US companies to pull statements in record numbers

The number of US companies forced to withdraw financial statements because of accounting errors has surged to a nine-year high, raising questions about why mistakes are going unnoticed by auditors.

In the first 10 months of this year, 140 public companies told investors that previous financial statements were unreliable and had to reissue them with corrected figures, according to data from Ideagen Audit Analytics.

That is up from 122 in the same period last year and more than double the figure four years ago. So-called reissuance restatements cover the most serious accounting errors, either because of the size of the mistake or because an issue is of particular concern to investors.

Peirce, Crypto Lawyers Eye Potential Regulatory Changes Under SEC Chair-Nominee Atkins

The cryptocurrency industry has not been shy about its discontent with outgoing Securities and Exchange Commission Chair Gary Gensler’s strict enforcement of digital currencies. And with President-elect Donald Trump’s return to the White House and nomination of crypto-friendly Paul Atkins as the SEC’s next chair, the industry is not hiding its excitement either.

Republican SEC Commissioner Hester Peirce and crypto industry attorneys shared their hopes of a friendlier crypto market and a less enforcement-focused Trump administration during a panel discussion Friday at the American Bar Association’s Federal Regulation of Securities Meeting in Washington.

“I do look forward to providing more clarity where we can provide more clarity,” Peirce said, “remembering that we’re a regulatory agency with an enforcement arm, not an enforcement agency that doesn’t have a regulatory arm.”

Donald Trump’s Bitcoin Reserve Would Rip Off Taxpayers

Buying Bitcoin with taxpayer dollars would serve no such public purpose. It has no industrial use, no claim to actual cash flows, no connection to the real economy. It’s a purely speculative instrument. Its price depends entirely on what a greater fool is willing to pay.

Creating such a reserve would, however, vastly enrich owners of existing Bitcoin. The post-election crypto rally offers a glimpse of what might happen, as buyers rushed to get ahead of the government’s purchases. If the world’s investors allocated even a small piece of their holdings to Bitcoin, the roughly 20 million tokens in existence would quickly rise in value, especially since only a fraction of those tokens actually trades.

The government, meanwhile, would be playing the greater fool — at a cost potentially in the hundreds of billions of dollars….

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The consequences for taxpayers could be dire. If Trump wants to reopen the crypto casino, so be it. But what happens in crypto should stay in crypto. Putting taxpayer dollars on the table could put millions of Americans at risk.

Ex-Allianz Fund Manager Avoids Jail Over $3 Billion Collapse

A former Allianz SE hedge-fund manager avoided prison and will instead spend 18 months in home confinement for fraudulently inflating the value of funds that ultimately collapsed, resulting in $3.2 billion in investor losses.

Gregoire Tournant, the former chief investment officer of the US-based Structured Alpha group of Allianz hedge funds, was sentenced Friday by US District Judge Laura Taylor Swain in Manhattan. The penalty, which also included three years of probation, was far below the seven years in prison sought by federal prosecutors. Source: