Back in September, Broc Romanek polled his readers on TheCorporateCounsel.net about when they believe SEC Chair Mary Jo White will serve her last day at the SEC. I guessed by the end of Q1 2017, and that turned out to be the most popular answer, receiving 42% of the 82 votes cast (see below).

In a Bloomberg article today, Benjamin Bain and Robert Schmidt report that Chair White has "has privately told agency officials that people with ties to both the Hillary Clinton and Donald Trump campaigns have asked if she would consider staying on to give the next president time to pick a successor." If Chair White agrees to do so, this would extend her term to some point in time beyond the January 20, 2017 swearing-in of the next president. Chair White reportedly stated that she expected any holdover to be brief, meaning that the end of Q1 2017 might still be a solid guess.

As the Bloomberg article points out, if Chair White does not stay on beyond President Obama's last day on January 20, it could cause problems due to the fact that Congress has failed to act on two existing commissioner vacancies on the five-person SEC. President Obama nominated Lisa Fairfax and Hester Peirce to be SEC commissioners on October 20, 2016, but over a year later those nominations continue to languish. Accordingly, if Chair White leaves before her replacement is confirmed, "Wall Street’s main regulator could slip into paralysis because it would be down to just two commissioners who vote on policy and enforcement actions" and those two commissioners (Democrat Kara Stein and Republican Michael Piwowar) often disagree.

Speaking of Fairfax and Peirce, I polled Enforcement Action readers here on this question: "When will SEC Commissioner nominees Lisa Fairfax and Hester Peirce be confirmed by the U.S. Senate?"

The most popular response, sadly, with 45% of the votes: "Haha, never, why are you so naive."

 

 

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