Morning Wire - Chairman Paul Atkins on Restoring America’s Capital Markets

Episode Date: December 7, 2025

Over the past decade, U.S. capital markets have changed— and not for the better.Far fewer companies are choosing to go public. SEC Chairman Paul Atkins joins the show to  break down what he sees as the growing regulatory barriers facing businesses, the impact of politicized rule-making, and the rising pressure from activist shareholder movements. Get the facts first with Morning Wire. - - - Wake up with new Morning Wire merch:⁠ https://bit.ly/4lIubt3⁠ - - - Today’s Sponsor: Balance of Nature: Go to https://balanceofnature.com/pages/podcasters for 50% off the Whole Health System FOR LIFE with this limited-time offer! - - - Privacy Policy:⁠ https://www.dailywire.com/privacy Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

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Atkins promised to return to what he called America's Hamiltonian dynamism, and to bring an end to the mountains of ESG disclosures and red tape that have throttled innovation and driven companies overseas. The question before us is not whether our entrepreneurs have the capacity to reinvent and reinvigorate our capital markets, but whether we as regulators have the will. In this new day, the SEC and under President Trump's leadership, I am pleased to report that we do. In this episode, we sit down with Chairman Atkins to discuss how to make initial public offering markets great again

and how we can keep countries like China honest when trading with the U.S. I'm Daily Wire, Executive Editor John Bickley with Georgia Howe. This is a weekend edition of Morning Wire. This is everything when it comes to your health. But life gets busy and honestly remembering the reorder supplements every month, that's just one more thing on your already packed to-do list. That's why I became a Balance of Nature preferred customer, and here's why it's a total game changer.

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Joining us now is Chairman Paul Atkins. Chairman, first of all, thank you so much for joining us. Thank you very much, John. Great to be with you. Now, you just gave this major speech before the New York Stock Exchange. You took aim at the previous administration's regulations in particular. You said they were used politically. How has that affected things?

Well, I think it skewed the marketplace, for example. And in one area, which many of your viewers, might be familiar with and following is sort of the digital asset area, cryptocurrencies and whatnot. There were really only two countries in the world that were working to make cryptocurrencies illegal, and that's communist China and the United States through the Securities and Exchange Commission. So that tells you one thing. So, you know, we are, we're taking a different attack at that, of course, and so we are trying to, to embrace technological advancements and innovation,

and because I think it's much more important to embrace it and to make sure it fits within our laws and rules here in the United States, rather than the alternative, is chase it offshore. And we saw what happened with FTX there, which was Sam Backman-Fried's operation, which was in the Bahamas, and he did a lot of panky-panky there and hand in the till and whatnot. But he had one, and this is the example I like to show, there was one legitimate firm that he had bought that was still operating in the United States, and it was a swaps trading platform for cryptocurrencies. And that was under CFTC regulation, and it had, it bought it by, you know, segregated accounts for customers.

So when FTX imploded, Ledger X, it was called, didn't skip a beat. It operated. No customer lost any assets. And then here recently, it was just sold out of the bankruptcy estate. And so it, and it lives on, you know, to do good by its customers. So that's an example of how responsible regulation and embracing financial innovation can lead to benefits for everybody. You said during your speech that the path to public ownership has become narrower and costlier. How do we reverse that? How do we get back to broader and more affordable? Well, so we're talking about companies becoming public. And so today we have about half the number of public companies as we had 30 years ago. And so that comes about, you know, you have mergers and acquisitions and you have bankruptcies and whatever. But so that takes, you know, the companies out of that population. And if, unless you have new ones coming in to replace the defunct ones, then, you know,

you're going to have necessarily a diminishing number of corporations. So over, what I'm suggesting here is that we address the reasons why people don't want to go public. It's so the idea is to make IPO great again, initial public offerings great again, and to make it cool to be public again. And the reason why people do not want to take their companies public is, one, the high cost of abiding by the regulations that the SEC has imposed over the years. Two is the litigation issues around, you know, a lot of frivolous lawsuits, let's say, that are filed against, public companies because lawyers know that they can extract some, you know, settlement and then get contingency fees out of that. And then finally is the weaponization of corporate governance. So shareholder proposals, many of your listeners probably, you know, have owners of securities in one way

or another, and so you often, every year for the annual general shareholder meeting, you get a proxy statement in the mail, and oftentimes there is, you know, at least one or more things that shareholders are asked to vote on. So those have been weaponized over the years by politicized shareholder activists who are pushing social agendas and other. They have their acts to grind about something. Most of these things don't get adopted by the shareholders at the annual meeting, but it's to pressure management in order to kind of extract from management concessions that advance the interests of these special interest groups. Are you talking about ESGs there?

That's something that we've reported on in the past, that kind of political agenda? A part of it. ESG, DEI, that whole thing. So environmental activists, social activists, that sort of thing, you know, is what we're talking about here. So this is a way to, that's why companies, I mean, these things are not central to why or how, in general, how a company makes money for its, that's what they're in the business for, after all, is to make money for their shareholders through dividends and whatnot.

And so these are really more, you know, side issues and not central to what's important for the economics of the company. So they're distractions. As I understand it, one of the other impediments, to going public, is the time it takes the process? Is there anything being done or can be done to speed it up? Well, that's one thing we'll be looking at as well. So all of this is, I mean, compare it to a boat. You know, if you have a boat and you don't tend to it at least every year and scrape the barnacles off, you know, you're going to slow down as process through the water. And so that's what we're going to try to do here.

But go through our rulebook and try to throw out things that don't deal with financial materiality of a company. And so that's with the cost of it is lawyers and accountants and everything else to go over disclosures that have just grown over time. But then you're talking about the actual. time to market, which is very important, obviously. But there have been, basically, we're still living in a paper world from the 1930s and 40s with our rulebook. And it's time to, you know, make it fit for purpose for the 21st century. I did want to ask you one more question about

your speech. You mentioned Alexander Hamilton and his vision for capital markets. What specific Hamiltonian principles do you think we've drifted away from? Well, I mean, Hamilton basically stood for the power of free markets and individual liberty and choice, you know, as to pursuing what the Constitution, the Declaration of Independence were talking about. And that's the protection of private property, you know, the pursuit of livelihood. And as they use the term happiness, which is not necessarily, you know, let's skip down the street and, you know, and be happy and whistle. but it was a concept of proper balance, you know, and to find that proper balance is what the Constitution guarantees. So anyway, so that's what Hamilton was focused on, and I think he was correct.

And so that, and, you know, Ludwig von Mises also, you know, has talked about the importance of free enterprise and individual liberty to make your choices and to pursue, you know, what's your goals are. Switching gears a little bit now. I wanted to ask you about China. China doesn't follow the same disclosure agreements that other countries do. Is that set to change anytime soon? Yeah, well, I mean, obviously they have generally a different system than we. So that's one issue that obviously the SEC will never change.

But at the same time, we have seen over the year. years, a real change of the type of companies that are being listed here in our markets from, you know, East Asia in particular. And so in particular, China, where a company may have operations or management or whatever based in China, and then they are incorporated maybe in the Caribbean on Barbuda or, you know, different islands down there, Cayman Islands. And then their primary listing is here in the United States on NASDAQ. And over the years, you know, I think it's great. What SEC has done over the last, you know, 40, 50 years is to encourage foreign companies to list here in the United States because then Americans can buy these shares, you know, under American law

and with American protections of disclosure and all of that, which I think is valuable. Rather than I'm abroad and then you have to worry about, you can receive your dividends, how am I going to, you know, change, you know, whatever, our road to dollars or whatever it may be. But over time, we've seen, in particular, as I mentioned with the Chinese companies, that if they're not being regulated in their home country, then these foreign companies that are listed in the United States have particular exemptions. They don't have to comply with all the rules that American companies do because we had the concept of substituting compliance. Okay, their home country is regulating. And so, you know, this is a convenience for Americans. But if the

Chinese companies now, they're listed in the United States, they should be under American regulation, but because of this kind of loophole in our laws, you know, are not subject to that. We give them exemption from that. That's what we're looking at. And so we've noticed over time that some of these shares, especially if they're penny stocks, you know, that they're, subject to what we call ramp and dump. So over time, we watch the price go up without any real explanation, no news about the company, and we monitor chat rooms and things like that. And then suddenly the price collapsed.

So that's because people are manipulating it. So we have stopped now trading of those sorts of companies. We start seeing the indicia there of what's going on. And then we stop trading with it. NASDAQ is cooperating with us and all. So we have about a dozen companies so far. So under my chairmanship here, we're taking more action in that room. It's a very complex world out there.

And I can imagine the process it takes to keep your eye on so many things at once. We appreciate you so much taking the time to talk with us, Chairman. And great luck with these efforts to really revamp the way we do business here. Great. Well, I appreciate your time, and I wish you all the best and your listeners too. Thank you so much. Thank you. That was SEC Chairman Paul Atkins, and this has been a weekend edition of Morning Wire.

Well, if this is an illusion, an echo of a voice that has died, and soon that echo will cease. They say that Merlin is mad. They say he was a king endeavored, the son of a princess of lost Atlantis. They say the future and the past are known to him. That the fire and the wind tell him their secrets. The magic of the hill folk and druids come forth at his easy command. They say he slew hundreds. Hundreds do you hear that the world burned and trembled at his wrath.

Died long before you and I were born. has returned to the land of the living. Fortigan is gone. Rome is gone. The Saxon is here. Saxon, Hengist has assembled the greatest war host ever seen in the island of the mighty. And before the summer is through,

he means to take the throne. And he will have it. If we are too busy, swobbling amongst ourselves to take up arms against him. Here is your hope. A king will arise to hold all Britain in his hand. A high king. It will be the wonder of the world.

You. To a future of peace. There'll be no peace in these lands, too. We are all dust. Men of the island of the mighty. You stand together. You stand as Britons. You stand as worn.

Great darkness is for his brothers our only hope to stand against it. Not our only hope. S.A. Mervyn slew seven men with his own. hands. I could say he slew 500. No man is capable of such a thing. No mortal man.