The regulatory outlook "at this moment is uncertain," Municipal Securities Rulemaking Board CEO Mark Kim said Thursday, adding that the financial regulation priorities of the new administration in Washington remain largely unclear.
"We obviously have a new administration, but that administration has not articulated very clear priorities with regards to financial regulation of our markets," Kim said during The Bond Buyer's National Outlook conference in New York.
While there has been some general conversation regarding deregulation and undoing the rules and regulations of the previous administration, "that hasn't translated into a particular policy around financial regulation," the MSRB CEO said.
President Donald Trump has nominated Paul Atkins to be the next Securities and Exchange Commission chair and the MSRB will wait for his confirmation "to better understand the priorities of the new SEC," Kim said.
"The role of the chair is very important in determining the regulatory outlook," he said. "Mr. Atkins' predecessor, [former SEC Chair Gary Gensler] , as I think all of you know, had a very aggressive regulatory agenda."
Kim added that the new administration has signaled one priority, "which is around the regulation of cryptocurrencies."
"And that has some implications for our market," the MSRB CEO said. "There's a lot of work to be done on the regulatory side in terms of understanding [and] agreeing on whether digital assets are securities."
Kim also said that he wanted to provide "a little bit of breaking news" during the conference.
"Yesterday, both the MSRB and FINRA announced that we are respectively delaying the implementation of our trade reporting rule amendments," he said, adding the amendments would reduce the timeframe requirement for reporting trades to one minute from 15 minutes.
FINRA is an acronym for the Financial Industry Regulatory Authority.
"We filed that rule with the SEC last year and [the] SEC approved it, and all that remains is for the MSRB and FINRA to file a notice on when that rule will become effective," Kim said. "So yesterday, MSRB and FINRA respectively published a notice indicating that we're going to delay establishing the effective date of that rule in order to address certain concerns that have been raised since the SEC approved the rule about the ability of firms to comply with that rule."
The MSRB's announcement Wednesday regarding the delay drew a positive reaction from the Bond Dealers of America.
"BDA welcomes the MSRB's decision to delay the announcement of a compliance deadline for amendments to Rule G-14 which will require most dealers to report [Real-time Transaction Reporting System] trades within one minute," Michael Decker, senior vice president for research and public policy at BDA, said in an email Wednesday.
