Canceled Senate Vote "Effectively Ends" Commissioner Crenshaw’s Tenure at SEC

Senate scraps vote to renominate SEC’s Crenshaw following crypto backlash

The Senate Banking Committee — still controlled by the Democrats until the next Congress starts in January — was scheduled to vote Wednesday morning on advancing her nomination to the full Senate, but the markup was shelved due to limited floor time available before the Congressional session ends Thursday, according to a committee aide.

The cancelation will effectively end Crenshaw’s tenure at the commission unless President-elect Trump chooses to renominate her when he takes office on Jan. 20. However, it would be highly unlikely for the crypto-friendly president-elect to nominate someone seen as part of the Biden regulatory apparatus that unleashed a massive crackdown on the $3 trillion digital asset industry — an industry that helped him get elected. Ironically, Trump, who must name two people from outside his own party to fill the minority seats, put up Crenshaw during his first term as president. 

Trump Should Reform Financial Regulators. Start With the SEC and CFTC

Much of this system was designed decades ago for a simpler world. One glaring example is the separation of the Securities and Exchange Commission and the Commodity Futures Trading Commission. One was established 90 years ago to protect investors in securities such as stocks and bonds; the other was created 50 years ago to oversee commodities markets and related futures and options contracts.

Today, when many financial companies trade in both markets, the two supervisors often overlap and don’t always properly communicate. […]

If Trump wants a relatively clear-cut reform, this would be a good place to start. Merging the two commissions would help streamline the rules, reduce compliance costs and ease cooperation with regulators overseas. It would be an ambitious change but not a radical one: Both a former CFTC commissioner and a current SEC commissioner have endorsed the idea.

Hack Disclosures Surged in 2024 After SEC’s Rule, Report Says

More corporate victims of cyberattacks disclosed their hacks during the first year of new federal reporting requirements, according to a Paul Hastings analysis of breach disclosures.

The law firm’s study, examining 75 disclosures from 48 public companies between Dec. 18, 2023 and Oct. 31, revealed a 60% increase in cyber incident disclosures since the US Securities and Exchange Commission’s new reporting requirements went into effect in December 2023. Of those, 78% were made within 8 days of discovery, according to the report released Wednesday. Only 30 incidents were reported in the same time period in 2023.

Insider Trading in Private Companies

What about private companies?

1. The essential fact about private companies — the thing that makes them “private” — is that they don’t have public-company disclosure requirements. There’s no law that they have to publish quarterly financial statements; there’s not even a law that they have to send their shareholders annual financial statements.3 The relationship between private companies and their shareholders is a private matter to be negotiated among themselves, not, for the most part, a matter of securities regulation. In fact a lot of big private companies do share a lot of business and financial information with their shareholders, because the shareholders want that and the companies work for the shareholders. But that’s not because the rules require it; it’s because the shareholders do.

2. Are you allowed to insider trade?

I think the answer in the US is, mostly, no…. 

Macy’s Accounting Scandal Raises Questions About Which Errors Matter

Macy’s decision to not withdraw old financial statements despite making sizable adjustments to earnings figures after finding $151 million in false bookkeeping entries has some accountants scratching their heads.

The retailer last month said an employee responsible for small-package delivery expense accounting intentionally made erroneous bookkeeping entries since late 2021. The discovery led Macy’s to delay reporting its quarterly results for two weeks and spurred a selloff of shares.

Last week, Macy’s said an internal investigation found no material impact or needed restatements to previously filed financials. The errors didn’t affect net sales, vendor payments, operating cash flows or compliance with debt covenants, the company said in a filing, so it treated the errors as a minor revision.

The decision is questionable given the weight of revisions on the retailer’s 2023 earnings, academics and accountants said. […]

“Macy’s says it did not impact trends in profit and that’s true, but only because the trend was already downward,” said Douglas Carmichael, an accounting professor at Baruch College and former chief auditor for the Public Company Accounting Oversight Board. “It dramatically increased the downward trend.”