Outgoing US Securities and Exchange Commission Chairman Gary Gensler said he is proud of the work the agency has done and says there is still “work to be done” less than two weeks before he will leave the agency.
During a Bloomberg TV interview on Wednesday, Gensler repeated his claim that crypto is “rich with bad actors,” while drawing comparisons to -former President Donald Trump-appointed chairman Jay Clayton. Clayton served as chairman of the SEC from 2017 to 2020.
Asked by Bloomberg about some of the SEC’s high-profile cases against crypto during Gensler’s tenure and whether that caused a change in behavior, Gensler said the agency built its work on top of what other previous chairmen did.
“It’s an area built around noncompliance and I’m proud of what we’ve done, which builds on what Chairman Clayton and others have done in the past,” Gensler said. “I think there’s work left to do.”
Executioner announced in November that he would step down on January 20, the day of President-elect Trump’s inauguration.
The relationship between the crypto industry and Gensler was strained during his time as head of the agency. Gensler argued that most cryptocurrencies qualify as securities and urged crypto companies to register with the SEC. Some in the crypto industry have hit back, saying it’s impossible to register with the agency, in part because rules were created for more traditional entities that differ from the digital asset industry.
During Clayton’s tenure as chairman of the SEC, he led the agency through the initial coin offering boom of 2017 and 2018. While time, his office filed a number of high-profile lawsuits, including against Look and later Ripple. Trump picked Clayton late last year as attorney for the Southern District of New York.
“He (Jay Clayton) brought 80 enforcement actions in this area,” Gensler said. “We’ve brought in about 100 in our four years, which is consistent. That’s maybe about 5% of what we do in our law enforcement.”
Gensler told Bloomberg that he divides the industry into two, one is bitcoin and “everything else.”
“I’ve been in finance for over four decades, and everything in the markets trades on a mix of fundamentals and sentiment at any given time,” Gensler said. “But I’ve never seen a field so wrapped up in sentiment and not so much about fundamentals.”
Trump knocked crypto-friendly former regulator Paul Atkins to lead the SEC, which would still need to be confirmed by the Senate.
