Wall Street lawyer Jay Clayton is slotted to head the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission in the Trump administration.
This is a big change from Chair White whose background was in prosecution. Chair White had a long list of prosecutions from serving a decade as the U.S. Attorney for the Southern District of New York. (She is the only woman to have held that position.) Then served another decade as a litigator in private practice.
Mr. Clayton has a wide-ranging corporate practice spanning mergers and acquisitions, IPOs, corporate governance, and investment advice. He is respected lawyer and will likely do a great job with the SEC.
But he is a very different kind of lawyer than Ms. White. He is a deal lawyer, largely working on corporate transactions and governance.
Perhaps that marks a change in the SEC from one of enforcement to one of enhancing the capital markets. Chair White was saddled with the rule-making imperatives from Dodd-Frank. With most of those in place, the SEC will have more bandwidth to focus its agenda. The appointment of Mr. Clayton seems to be an indication that the SEC may focus more on the other prongs of its mission: maintain fair, orderly, and efficient markets, and facilitate capital formation.
The front page of the Wall Street Journal laments the loss of public companies: America’s Roster of Public Companies Is Shrinking Before Our Eyes. I think most people are guessing that Mr. Clayton will try to fix that issue.
With the appointment of Mr. Clayton, that still leaves two open slots to be filled. No word on whether the stalled nominations of Lisa Fairfax and and Hester Peirce will proceed or whether there will be new candidates.