Jay Clayton, a former Wall Street lawyer who has headed the Securities and Exchange Commission as the financial markets’ top regulator during the Trump administration, is leaving the position at year’s end, the SEC announced Monday.
Clayton’s term runs through mid-2021. It is common practice for agency heads or Cabinet members appointed under an outgoing administration to leave early. A new SEC chair is expected to be named by President-elect Joe Biden.
One of President Donald Trump’s earliest appointments in 2017, Clayton has presided over a deregulatory push to soften rules affecting Wall Street and the financial markets, as Trump pledged when he took office. Rules under the Dodd-Frank law that tightened the reins on banks and Wall Street in the wake of the 2008-09 financial crisis and the Great Recession have been nipped around the edges.
The market watchdog agency is politically independent from the administration. With two like-minded Republicans sitting as commissioners on the five-member SEC through most of his tenure, Clayton, an independent, also has eased rules for smaller companies raising capital in the market.
FILE – In this June 25, 2020 file photo, Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) Chairman Jay Clayton testifies before a House Committee on a Financial Services hearing on Financial Services Capital Markets and Emergency Lending in the COVID-19 Era on Capitol Hill in Washington. Clayton, a former Wall Street lawyer who has headed the Securities and Exchange Commission as the financial markets’ top regulator during the Trump administration, is leaving the position at year’s end. Clayton’s term runs through mid-2021. (Brendan Smialowski/Pool via AP, File)The moves have brought criticism from Democratic lawmakers as well as advocates for consumers and individual investors.