President-elect Donald Trump on Wednesday said he would nominate Paul Atkins to run the Securities and Exchange Commission, putting a traditional conservative and prominent Washington insider atop Wall Street’s major regulator.
Atkins, a Republican former SEC commissioner, is replacing Gary Gensler, President Biden’s hard-charging chair whose ambitious agenda led him to clash with Wall Street and the crypto industry.
Atkins “believes in the promise of robust, innovative capital markets that are responsive to the needs of Investors, & that provide capital to make our Economy the best in the World. He also recognizes that digital assets & other innovations are crucial to Making America Greater than Ever Before,” Trump wrote in a post on his social media platform.
Gensler, who is stepping down on Jan. 20, inked more than 40 rules aimed at boosting transparency, reducing risks, and stamping out conflicts of interest on Wall Street and sued multiple crypto firms he alleged were flouting SEC rules.
Atkins is expected to review many of Gensler’s rules, as well as enforcement actions wending their way through the courts, adopt a softer touch on crypto, and pursue rule changes aimed at promoting capital formation.
Atkins is the chief executive at Patomak Global Partners, a Washington-based strategic and risk management advisory business he founded in 2009. The well-connected firm’s leaders, many of them former federal regulators, consult with banks, fintech companies and investment firms, among others. Atkins’ personal clients have included Deutsche Bank as a court-appointed monitor and the Chicago Board Options Exchange as an expert witness.
Atkins served on Trump’s transition team in 2016, when he was also a contender to lead the SEC, Reuters reported at the time. He was then among the high-profile business executives on a short-lived advisory council for President Trump.
The crypto industry, which poured money into Trump’s campaign, has pushed for an industry-friendly SEC chair that would end Gensler’s crackdown, and industry executives see him as a friendly pick.
He has been involved in crypto policy as co-chair of the Token Alliance, which works to “develop best practices for digital asset issuances and trading platforms,” and the broader blockchain trade association, the Chamber of Digital Commerce, as a member of its advisory board.
Atkins has a long history with the SEC. In the early 1990s, he was a staffer for two former chairmen, Richard Breeden and Arthur Levitt. In 2002, Atkins was appointed by President George W. Bush to be an SEC commissioner, a role he held until 2008. At the SEC, Atkins said his “overriding philosophy” was based on the “free market system,” and in the role he opposed what he saw as unproductive increases in oversight of hedge funds, internal audit controls, and stock trading rules known as Reg NMS.
Atkins has criticized socially conscious corporate shareholder activism, an idea in alignment with the Trump administration’s recent plans to challenge so-called “woke” capitalism.
