Today at 10 am ET: SEC Chairman Atkins to Deliver "Major Speech" at NYSE

New York Stock Exchange

On the cusp of America’s 250th anniversary, SEC Chairman Paul Atkins will ring the opening bell at the New York Stock Exchange (9:15 a.m.) and deliver a major speech (10 a.m.) entitled “Revitalizing America’s Markets at 250” to outline his vision to strengthen U.S. capital markets for the next century and what the SEC is doing now to lay that groundwork.

Trump commutes 7-year prison sentence of former private equity CEO David Gentile days after his sentence began

President Donald Trump has commuted the seven-year sentence of former private equity CEO David Gentile days after he reported to prison, a White House official confirmed.

Gentile was sentenced in May to seven years in prison on wire and security fraud charges. He began his sentence on Nov. 14 and was released on Nov. 26, Bureau of Prisons spokesman Donald Murphy said. The White House pardon czar, Alice Marie Johnson, also confirmed Gentile’s release in a post on X.

Gentile was the CEO and co-founder of GPB Capital Holdings and was convicted by a federal jury in August 2024 of conspiracy to commit securities fraud, conspiracy to commit wire fraud, securities fraud and two counts of wire fraud.

The U.S. Attorney’s Office for the Eastern District of New York, which brought the indictment during the Biden administration, said at the time that the “charges related to a years-long scheme to defraud more than 10,000 investors by misrepresenting the source of funds used to make monthly distribution payments and the amount of revenue generated by three of GPB’s investment funds.”

Vanguard Relents on Crypto ETFs, Will Allow Them on Its Platform

Vanguard Group, the world’s second-largest asset manager, has decided to allow ETFs and mutual funds that primarily hold cryptocurrencies to be traded on its platform, reversing a longstanding position.

Starting on Tuesday, Vanguard will allow ETFs and mutual funds that primarily hold select cryptocurrencies, including Bitcoin, Ether, XRP, and Solana, to be eligible for trading on its platform. It’s a compromise that belies the firm’s long-standing view that digital assets are too volatile and speculative for serious portfolios and comes despite a more than $1 trillion drawdown in crypto market value since early October.

SEC Closes New Probe Into Fyre Festival Founder Billy McFarland

The U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission has ended its probe into the latest venture of Fyre Festival founder Billy McFarland, his attorney told the New York Law Journal and Law. com.

In a brief letter to defense attorney Harlan Protass, the SEC indicated on Nov. 21 that an investigation into McFarland and his entities had concluded and that the commission will not recommend enforcement. The commission was investigating both McFarland and his new companies, Fyre Holdings and BZM Media.

“We are pleased that the SEC, after 2.5 years of investigation and the review of more than 30,000 documents, closed its investigation of Mr. McFarland (and two related companies, Fyre Holdings and BZM Media), taking no action and without any suggestion that there ever was any misconduct,” Protass said in a statement.

URL guessing

We talk occasionally around here about the simplest way to obtain material non-public financial information, which is to go to the website of some company or government agency, find last quarter’s earnings release or last month’s economic data, look at the URL of the page, and then change “q2” to “q3” or “sept” to “oct” or whatever in the URL, to get the likely URL of the next release. Then type that into your browser like an hour before the new information is supposed to be released, and see what comes up. Mostly, nothing will come up: The data will be on the website when it is scheduled to be on the website.

But occasionally the company or agency will put the data on the website early, thinking thoughts like “well, it is 2025, nobody types addresses into web browsers; the only way people will get to this web page is when we put out a press release or an announcement on our homepage linking to it, and we won’t do that until the official release time.” This is a generally reasonable thought process, but when the data is meaningful enough somebody probably will go to the trouble to type an address into a web browser.

Anyway the UK’s Office for Budget Responsibility’s economic and fiscal outlook report was leaked hours early last week through URL-guessing….

‘Hair salons and saunas’: Perks are the new frontier in the battle for top lawyers

Competition for top lawyers has intensified in London in recent years, driven by the significant growth of US-founded law firms such as Paul Weiss in the capital. This has led to escalating pay wars at both the junior and senior end of the profession.

Newly qualified lawyers in their mid-twenties can earn as much as £180,000, while top partners can receive packages in the double-digit millions of dollars. Retention and referral bonuses have been dangled, three-year guarantees offered.

Now, law firms are seeking to differentiate themselves beyond pay. From health food to juice bars, office perks have become the new frontier in the Big Law war for talent.

Where Paul Weiss is offering its lawyers a shiny new office space — the firm is housed in the former UK headquarters of Twitter — complete with a restaurant providing the best “fuel”, and top career coaches on call, its peers are equipping their premises with the latest state-of-the-art exercise equipment and wellbeing spaces.

Kirkland & Ellis, the world’s biggest law firm by revenue and a rival to Paul Weiss, moved into a new office this summer that offers saunas, a hair salon and a 10,000-book library.