{"id":58936,"date":"2025-12-02T21:49:16","date_gmt":"2025-12-02T21:49:16","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/58936\/"},"modified":"2025-12-02T21:49:16","modified_gmt":"2025-12-02T21:49:16","slug":"trumps-sec-chair-blasts-biden-over-weaponized-woke-capitalism","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/58936\/","title":{"rendered":"Trump’s SEC chair blasts Biden over ‘weaponized’ woke capitalism"},"content":{"rendered":"

SEC Chairman Paul Atkins ripped Joe Biden<\/a> on Tuesday, accusing the former president\u2019s administration of weaponizing financial rules to push his woke agenda as Wall Street\u2019s new top cop vowed to \u201cmake IPOs great again\u201d.<\/p>\n

The new head of the US Securities and Exchange Commission made a thinly veiled dig at disclosure red tape, such as environmental and social governance rules, that he lambasted as \u201cregulatory creep.\u201d <\/p>\n

The veteran corporate lawyer also lashed out at the Dem commander-in-chief, insisting his allies \u201cweaponized\u201d financial disclosure rules \u201cto advance social and political agendas.\u201d<\/p>\n

\u201cThe path to public ownership has become narrower, costlier, and overly burdened with rules that often create more friction than benefit,\u201d the 67-year-old attorney said.<\/p>\n

Trump\u2019s SEC chair Paul Atkins was speaking at the New York Stock Exchange with a vow to Make IPOs Great Again. James Franey\/NY Post<\/p>\n

\u201cThese trends have eroded American competitiveness; locked average investors out of some of the most dynamic companies; and pushed entrepreneurs to seek capital elsewhere, either in the private markets or on foreign shores,\u201d he added.<\/p>\n

\u201cThese decades of accretive rulemakings have produced reams of paperwork that can do more to obscure than to illuminate,\u201d Atkins, who took up the role in April, said, criticizing lengthy annual reports and proxy statements that burden companies with high costs while overwhelming investors.<\/p>\n

Atkins also warned that the burden of complying with the SEC rulebook, which he inherited from his interventionist predecessor, Gary Gensler, was a barrier to raising capital for smaller companies.<\/p>\n

\u201cThe last comprehensive reform to these thresholds took place in 2005. This dereliction of regulatory upkeep has resulted in a company with a public float of as low as $250 million being subject to the same disclosure requirements as a company that is one hundred times its size,\u201d he said.<\/p>\n

Atkins\u2019 comments came as the final Democrat commissioner on the SEC, Caroline Crenshaw, prepares to leave office when her term ends next month.<\/p>\n

Atkins rang the Opening Bell on Wall Street on Tuesday before his speech, calling for a return to the basics of American capitalism. James Franey\/NY Post<\/p>\n

It leaves just GOP commissioners Atkins, Hester M. Peirce, and one-time acting chair Mark T. Uyeda are the only top SEC officials left in office as the current administration looks to take a more light-touch approach to regulating financial markets.<\/p>\n

Atkins, who previously served at the SEC in the 1990s and returned as chairman earlier this year, tied the critique to a broader historical narrative as America approaches its 250th anniversary in 2026.<\/p>\n

He issued a full-throated defense of America\u2019s capitalist past and a return to founding father Alexander Hamilton\u2019s vision of economic freedom.<\/p>\n

\u201cHamilton understood that markets, structured properly, can unleash the might of American dynamism as no monarch or government ministry possibly could,\u201d Atkins told an audience of officials and bankers.<\/p>\n

The SEC is Wall Street\u2019s top financial watchdog. Atkins was speaking at an event to mark this nation\u2019s 250th anniversary earlier today in New York. James Franey\/NY Post<\/p>\n

\u201cOur prosperity is no accident of history\u2014nor is our primacy assured in the future,\u201d he added. \u201cIn recent years, our regulatory frameworks have veered from the founding ideals that helped the United States
to once stand without peer as the world\u2019s destination for public companies.\u201d<\/p>\n

The crypto-friendly Trump appointee<\/a> pointed to a 40% drop in US-listed companies since the mid-1990s, from over 7,000 to about 4,200, blaming rules that multiplied faster than the problems they aimed to solve.<\/p>\n

Atkins, in an interview with Fox Business in July, hinted that he could support combining the SEC and the Commodity Futures Trading Commission, a smaller regulator that focuses on derivatives, as lawmakers grapple with how to oversee the burgeoning US crypto market.<\/p>\n

He said that he had supported it \u201cfor years\u201d and that it \u201cmakes a lot of sense \u2014 especially with the potentially overlapping jurisdictions\u201d between the two as America looks to become the world\u2019s major player in cryptocurrency.<\/p>\n

It follows years of stifling regulations under the Biden administration, where investors complained of a \u201cturf war\u201d between the two bodies. <\/p>\n

The SEC regulates the securities markets, including stocks, bonds, and mutual funds, while the CFTC regulates the derivatives markets, such as futures, options, and swaps. In Britain, for example, both jobs are handed to one sole watchdog: the Financial Conduct Authority.<\/p>\n

Speaking exclusively to The Post after his speech on Wall Street, Atkins downplayed the chances of an SEC-CFTC merger coming to fruition during President Trump\u2019s second term in office. <\/p>\n

\u201cCongress will have to do it, and I don\u2019t see that happening,\u201d Atkins said. \u201cBut we can do so much in the meantime. We can harmonize things (with the CFTC)\u2026we will be able to collaborate and work together.<\/p>\n

\u201cThere should be no daylight between the two agencies, and that\u2019s our goal,\u201d he added. \u201cThe field is littered after a battle with bodies of would-be new products that got killed in the crossfire.\u201d<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"SEC Chairman Paul Atkins ripped Joe Biden on Tuesday, accusing the former president\u2019s administration of weaponizing financial rules…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":58937,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[6],"tags":[288,153,9,11,10,31746,15166,3417],"class_list":{"0":"post-58936","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-new-york","8":"tag-business","9":"tag-donald-trump","10":"tag-new-york","11":"tag-new-york-headlines","12":"tag-new-york-news","13":"tag-sec","14":"tag-securities-and-exchange-commission","15":"tag-wall-street"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/58936","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=58936"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/58936\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/58937"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=58936"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=58936"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=58936"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}