Recent Developments for Directors
New SEC Chair Expected to Take Agency Back to Basics President Trump’s nominee for SEC Chair, Paul Atkins, advocates a business-friendly, light-touch regulatory philosophy and is expected to lead the agency to retether its rulemaking to the SEC’s three-part statutory mission — facilitating capital formation; protecting investors; and maintaining fair, orderly, and efficient markets. Atkins […]
Julia Thompson, Keith Halverstam, and Jenna Cooper are Partners at Latham & Watkins LLP. This post is based on a Latham memorandum by Ms. Thompson, Mr. Halverstam, Ms. Cooper, Charles Ruck, Ryan Maierson, and Joel Trotter.
New SEC Chair Expected to Take Agency Back to Basics
President Trump’s nominee for SEC Chair, Paul Atkins, advocates a business-friendly, light-touch regulatory philosophy and is expected to lead the agency to retether its rulemaking to the SEC’s three-part statutory mission — facilitating capital formation; protecting investors; and maintaining fair, orderly, and efficient markets. Atkins previously served on the SEC Staff from 1990 to 1994 and as an SEC Commissioner from 2002 to 2008. In recent years, the SEC has faced legal challenges to sweeping and ambitious rulemaking efforts — covering subjects from climate change to daily share repurchase activity to board diversity mandates — that courts have paused or invalidated in response to claims that the SEC exceeded its statutory authority. In the coming years, companies can expect the SEC to concentrate its efforts on more traditional areas of disclosure regulation, limited by what is material to investors, in contrast to the agency’s more expansive regulatory approach in recent years.
