You turn to us for voices you won't hear anywhere else.

Sign up for Democracy Now!'s Daily Digest to get our latest headlines and stories delivered to your inbox every day.

Donald Trump Taps Wall Street Lawyer Walter Clayton as SEC Chair

HeadlineJan 05, 2017

Donald Trump has named Wall Street attorney Walter “Jay” Clayton to head the Securities and Exchange Commission. As a partner at the law firm Sullivan & Cromwell, Clayton gave legal advice to investment banks including Goldman Sachs, Barclays and Bear Stearns—whose collapse helped usher in the financial crisis of 2008. In 2011, Clayton co-authored a report blasting the Obama administration’s SEC over its enforcement of the Foreign Corrupt Practices Act, which bars corporate bribery. Democratic Congressmember Maxine Waters, the ranking member of the House Financial Services Committee, said in a statement, “Jay Clayton is just the latest addition to the growing pool of Wall Street insiders that make up the Trump administration. As head of the SEC, Clayton will have the power to carry his pro-Wall Street agenda to the agency that is entrusted with regulating Wall Street.”

The original content of this program is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 3.0 United States License. Please attribute legal copies of this work to democracynow.org. Some of the work(s) that this program incorporates, however, may be separately licensed. For further information or additional permissions, contact us.

Non-commercial news needs your support

We rely on contributions from our viewers and listeners to do our work.
Please do your part today.
Make a donation
Top