Paul Atkins

In a speech before the New York Stock Exchange this week, SEC Chairman Paul Atkins slammed the Biden administration for using financial rules as a political weapon.

While sporting a bright red Make IPOs Great Again hat, Atkins promised to return to what he called America's Hamiltonian dynamism and to bring an end to the mountains of ESG disclosures and red tape that have throttled innovation and driven companies overseas.

The question before us is not whether our entrepreneurs have the capacity to reinvent and reinvigorate our capital markets, but whether we as regulators have the will.

In this new day, the SEC and under President Trump's leadership, I am pleased to report that we do.

Thank you very much, John.

Great to be with you.

Well, I think it skewed the marketplace, for example.

And in one area, which many of your viewers might be familiar with and following, is the digital asset area, cryptocurrencies and whatnot.

There were really only two countries in the world that were working to make cryptocurrencies illegal, and that's communist China and

and the United States through the Securities and Exchange Commission.

That tells you one thing.

We're taking a different tack at that, of course, and so we are trying to embrace technological advancements and innovation because I think it's much more important to embrace it and to make sure it fits within our laws and rules here in the United States.

rather than the alternative, is chase it offshore.

And we saw what happened with FTX there, which was Sam Backman Freed's operation, which was in the Bahamas.

And he did a lot of hanky-panky there and hand in the till and whatnot.

But he had one, and this is the example I'd like to show.

There was one legitimate firm that he had bought that was still operating in the United States.

And it was a swaps trading platform for cryptocurrencies there.

And that was under CFTC regulation, and it had – it bided by segregated accounts for customers.

So when FTX imploded, LedgerX, it was called, didn't skip a beat.