The SEC and Its Relationship to Cryptocurrency

The regulatory agency sits between the U.S. government and the financial sector. It is in no rush to give up its wide discretion over the new sector of cryptocurrency.

SEC Chairman Gary Gensler gives congressional testimony in 2022. Screenshot from YouTube. Source.

After the Federal Reserve, the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) is the second-most important of the federal bureaucracies that steer the U.S. financial system. The SEC’s 4500 staff interpret and enforce regulations on the trading of financial securities, which mostly means stocks of publicly traded companies; bonds; and financial derivatives such as futures markets, credit default swaps, or many others. These markets are colossal. In 2019, the total market capitalization of all publicly traded U.S. stocks was almost $38 trillion.¹ In that year the total trading volume was $23 trillion, slightly higher than the United States’ entire GDP of $21 trillion.² In 2022 alone, the SEC issued $6.4 billion of fines across 760 “enforcement actions” in the course of regulating these markets.³