At close of business today, my time as SEC Commissioner will reach its end.
I am proud of all we accomplished. We modernized our regulatory framework to bring it in line with current realities, brought greater transparency to parts of our market that were opaque, and continued to harness our enforcement powers to fight and prevent fraud, market manipulation, and insider trading.
We promoted market integrity, transparency, resiliency, competition, and investor confidence by:
- Modernizing mutual fund and exchange-traded fund disclosures for investors;
- Updating truth-in-naming rules for funds that will ensure that a particular name means what it says and does what it means;
- Empowering shareholders to assess whether executive compensation is tied to corporate performance;
- Enhancing privacy protections for hundreds of millions of retail investors in our country;
- Requiring public companies to disclose their material cybersecurity incidents, so that investors can better understand how such incidents affect a company’s bottom line;
- Requiring public companies to inform investors about how they are dealing with climate risks;
- Approving updated auditing standards that make financial reporting more reliable;
- Strengthening insider trading rules that enhance accountability of corporate insiders;
- Modernizing stock market rules to lower prices and fees for investors;
- Strengthening the resiliency of the $26 trillion U.S. treasuries market through more central clearing;
- Reducing the securities transaction settlement cycle from two days to one;
- Strengthening money market fund resiliency; and many others.
These reforms will level the playing field for all investors – large and small – and benefit our capital markets for years to come.
It has been a great honor to serve alongside my distinguished colleagues: Chair Gary Gensler and Commissioners Hester Peirce, Caroline Crenshaw, and Mark Uyeda. Best wishes to them and to Commission staff for future success.
