Wall Street penalties fall in Trump’s first year, study says

In its latest fiscal year, Wall Street’s top regulator sought the smallest amount of penalties since 2013, a drop that took place as the agency went months without permanent leadership and could show a softer approach to policing wrongdoing.

The Securities and Exchange Commission tried to obtain $3.4 billion in fines and disgorgement from companies and individuals during the 12 months ended in September, according to data collected by Urska Velikonja, a Georgetown University law professor. The SEC filed 612 enforcement cases, also the fewest in four years, Velikonja’s research shows.

The time period includes former SEC Chair Mary Jo White’s final months at the agency, Commissioner Michael Piwowar’s brief stint leading it, and the first five months of new Chairman Jay Clayton’s tenure.

Although the data spans a transition atop the SEC, it may be early evidence that President Donald Trump’s more friendly tone toward corporations is having an impact on the regulator’s investigations into wrongdoing, according to Velikonja.

She points out that since Clayton — the former Wall Street deals lawyer appointed by Trump — took over in May, the agency has pursued just two sanctions against large financial firms: a $35 million settlement with State Street Corp. and a $97 million case against Barclays Plc.

In the same period a year earlier, more than a dozen big financial companies faced SEC sanctions, including Goldman Sachs, Bank of America Corp.’s Merrill Lynch unit, UBS Group and hedge fund firm Och-Ziff Capital Management Group, Velikonja said.

The overall decline in cases might show that the agency is shifting away from White’s so-called broken windows policy of aggressively pursuing smaller infractions to deter bigger violations, according to Velikonja.

“The big takeaway is that the sweeps are gone,” she said in an interview. “They’re not going after those technical violations.”

SEC spokeswoman Judy Burns and Chris Carofine, a spokesman for Clayton, didn’t immediately respond to requests for comment.

Not only did penalties go down in the aggregate for fiscal 2017 compared with the year earlier, but the median fine did as well, falling 35 percent, according to Velikonja’s analysis. She attributes that drop to the Republican view that corporate fines harm shareholders, who often have already been hurt when allegations of wrongdoing drive down companies’ stock price.