FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE
Tuesday, November 29, 2016
Contact: Nick Jacobs, 202-618-6430 or njacobs@bettermarkets.com
SEC Committee Reaches a New Low by Voting Against Recommendation for the SEC to Regularly Obtain Investors’ Views and Opinions
Washington, D.C. – Lev Bagramian, Senior Securities Policy Advisor for Better Markets, today issued this statement following the Security and Exchange Commission’s (SEC) Equity Market Structure Advisory Committee’s (EMSAC) 9 to 7 vote to reject the recommendation of EMSAC’s Customer Issues Subcommittee that the SEC conduct periodic surveys on retail investor confidence and concerns:
“The SEC exists to protect and promote investors’ interests, but today a committee it created, the Equity Market Structure Advisory Committee (EMSAC), voted to not even bother to recommend periodic SEC investor surveys. This is a new low for a committee that is riddled with conflicts of interest and is ineffective. The EMSAC should have embraced the recommendations of its subcommittee on Customer Issues, which is mandated to ‘consider initiatives to protect investor interests and promote investor confidence.’
“Remarkably, EMSAC voted against the recommendation based on an argument that retail investors don’t know what’s best for them, and therefore should not be listened to. EMSAC should be embarrassed by this vote. Given that EMSAC refuses to act in investors’ best interests, the SEC should ignore the vote and conduct the surveys.”
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