On September 16, a New York Post’s correspondent, Charles Gasparino, released an article, criticising the SEC’s chairman Gary Gensler. The journalist stated that his actions are reminiscent of the Banana Republic’s dictators. Let’s explore the article in more detail.
A Banana Republic is a term used to describe a government or organisation that exhibits authoritarian or corrupt behaviour.
Gary Gensler’s Banana Agency
According to Charles Gasparino, Gensler is regulating crypto through enforcement. He also highlights the chairman’s wish to change “decades of securities laws”, mounting more and more pressure on big companies and making them disclose information beyond just some financial details.
Moreover, the author outlines the fact that Gensler is choosing to ignore real and obvious violations.
“The SEC chief is supposed to be Wall Street’s top cop but, like Bragg, Gensler has chosen to ignore real malfeasance such as the obvious pumping and dumping we’ve seen in some “meme stocks,” costing generational wealth for small investors who believed the pumpers”, Gasparino writes.
Gensler’s targets
In Gasparino’s view, Gary Gensler is carefully picking his targets. As an example, the journalist recalls a recent situation involving a trading firm Virtu and its CEO Doug Cifu. Cifu has long been critical to the SEC head’s reign.
Last week, the SEC accused Virtu of not protecting client trading data, trying to turn this allegation into “the crime of the century”, without presenting any substantial evidence.
According to the article, the watchdog is scrutinising Virtu's actions from 2018 to 2019, during an acquisition and a control system flaw. Allegedly, Virtu's traders had access to the company's market activities, exploited this information for profit, and misled customers, violating securities laws.
However, the company had itself informed the regulator about issues concerning record-keeping. Besides, insider trading is not included in the complaint.
Apparently, as Gasparino claims, Gensler just wanted to punish his critic.
Conclusions
Gasparino says that after Gensler is done with “fixing” the markets, “investors might end up as roadkill”.
Currently, the SEC is putting pressure on Binance, accusing the crypto exchange of illegally earning money from American investors and issuing unregistered securities.
Additionally, the watchdog is fighting against Ripple for almost the same reasons. On July 13, 2023, the company managed to achieve a partial victory over the SEC, but things are far from being over still.
Last but not least, the regulator also postpones the decisions on Bitcoin ETFs applications, which pulls the market down.
The whole crypto community has been having uncertain opinions regarding Gary Gensler for a while now. If you want to learn more about what is the deal with the SEC chair, read our article.
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