SEC

Recordkeeping lapses lead to fines as looming government shutdown threatens SEC workload.

Franklin Templeton has joined fellow asset manager powerhouses Fidelity and BlackRock in the race to win approval to offer the first U.S. exchange-traded fund that invests directly in bitcoin. 

The proposed rule would make it virtually impossible for lenders to enter into routine hedging transactions.

The U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission is probing the non-QM lender, which pledges to promote homeownership in underserved communities, over its mortgage-backed securities, according to people with direct knowledge of the matter. 

Cincinnati-based Fifth Third Securities is the seventh firm charged by the Commission for failing to comply with the appropriate disclosures in connection with the limited offering exemption.

Carrie Tolstedt, the longtime head of retail banking at Wells, is resolving legal problems tied to her role in the bank's phony-accounts scandal. Earlier this year, she agreed to plead guilty to a criminal charge as part of a deal that calls for up to 16 months behind bars.

The Securities and Exchange Commission plows ahead with plans to boost oversight of the private fund industry. 

The founder of the defunct fintech that provided online college financial aid services was charged with fraud for inflating the company's customer base ahead of being acquired by JPMorgan.

The Securities and Exchange Commission has also proposed regulation to "level the playing field" in the equities market.

U.S. authorities are asking crypto investors and trading firms that worked closely with FTX to hand over information on the company and its key figures, including founder Sam Bankman-Fried and the former head of his Alameda Research investment arm, Caroline Ellison.

Goldman Sachs Group will pay $4 million to settle U.S. regulators' claims that its asset management unit didn't properly weigh environmental, social and governance factors in some of its investment products.

Grayscale Investments, the largest crypto asset manager, said the Securities and Exchange Commission acted arbitrarily earlier this year in rebuffing a bid to convert its $12 billion spot bitcoin trust into an exchange-traded fund.

The SEC sued Ripple in 2020, alleging that the crypto payments company and its top executives misled XRP investors because it failed to register the digital asset as a security and did not provide adequate disclosure.

Barclays will pay a $2 million fine to resolve allegations that it sent client orders to its own trading venue even when customers could have gotten better deals at competing platforms.

Barclays said some of its bankers may face disciplinary action and pay cuts after the firm agreed to a $361 million penalty to settle U.S. allegations that it failed to register billions of dollars worth of securities offerings.

The SEC and other regulatory agencies have raised the environmental, social and governance ante. Financial institutions will need to find a way to chip in before the stakes are raised even higher.  

The company behind the digital coin Hydro and a crypto market-making firm tried to artificially inflate the token's price after it was offered through a so-called airdrop, according to the Securities and Exchange Commission.

The saga over cryptocurrency regulation took another twist courtesy of a comment buried in a Securities and Exchange Commission lawsuit that hints at a case for U.S. jurisdiction over the ethereum blockchain.

The cryptocurrency firm Ripple Labs sought to defeat a Securities and Exchange Commission suit by claiming that its XRP token isn't a security subject to the regulator's authority.

"The SEC may not want to answer to Congress on its climate disclosure rule, but ultimately, the SEC will have to answer to the courts — which should make it nervous," the Senate Banking Committee's Pat Toomey warned the agency's chairman, Gary Gensler.