SEC Commissioners Peirce and Uyeda Say Whistleblower Secrecy Undermines Faith in Program

SEC Whistleblower Mission Plagued by Secrecy, Commissioners Say

The SEC’s five commissioners have the power to regulate financial systems, protect investors and make rules impacting more than $100 trillion in securities trades each year.

They don’t, however, have the power to tell taxpayers or Congress why awards topping $100 million sometimes go to whistleblowers the commissioners feel shouldn’t get paid. They can’t detail their objections publicly or provide any facts not included in sparse, heavily redacted releases announcing the awards.

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That frustration spilled out last month in response to two whistleblower awards totaling $122 million. Peirce and Commissioner Mark Uyeda penned an open letter alleging the agency’s excessive secrecy undermines faith in the program, and lamenting that they weren’t free to explain why the money shouldn’t have been awarded.

New titans of Wall Street: how Jane Street rode the ETF wave to ‘obscene’ riches

When Wall Street scrambled to launch bitcoin funds earlier this year, there was just one trading company named in regulatory filings as an anchor market-maker for every single one: Jane Street.

The move underscored how a quirky and opaque New York firm has used its dominance in exchange traded funds and embrace of more finicky financial securities as a springboard to become the most profitable of all the trading firms that are now a significant force in markets.

Last year was the fourth straight year that Jane Street generated net trading revenues of more than $10bn, according to investor documents seen by the Financial Times. Its gross trading revenues of $21.9bn were equivalent to roughly one-seventh of the combined equity, bond, currency and commodity trading revenues of all the dozen major global investment banks last year, according to Coalition Greenwich data.

“The amount of money they make is almost obscene. And that comes from handling instruments that many other people don’t want to touch,” said Larry Tabb, a longtime analyst of the industry who now works at Bloomberg Intelligence. “That’s where the greatest profits are, but also the greatest risks.”

SEC, Fund Advisers Head Toward Trial Over Billion-Dollar Losses

An SEC enforcement action against two financial firms and their managers over more than a billion dollars in investment losses raises factual issues about that must be decided by a jury, a federal court ruled.

Neither the Securities and Exchange Commission nor the defendants can win on any of the claims based on the lack of a real dispute about the evidence, Judge Sunil R. Harjani said Thursday for the US District Court for the Northern District of Illinois.

EV startup Fisker faces probe by US securities regulator

The U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission is investigating Fisker and has sent multiple subpoenas to the bankrupt EV maker, according to a filing by the regulator on Friday.

Fisker filed for bankruptcy protection in June, after burning through cash in an attempt to ramp-up production of its Ocean SUVs.