SEC Needs to Take 'Bottom to Top' Review of Fixed Income Markets: Crenshaw

Once Securities and Exchange Commission Chairman Jay Clayton departs at year-end, the four member agency — which will consist of two Republicans and two Democrats — can likely find bipartisan agreement on fixed income market structure issues, according to SEC Commissioner Caroline Crenshaw.

“Right now, our fixed income markets are regulated using a regime that … has been imported from the equity markets,” Crenshaw, a Democrat, said Friday during the virtual Georgetown Financial Markets Quality Conference. “This can cause problems. Fixed income securities are traded in a very different way.”

The commission should take “a bottom to top look at the corporate and muni markets. … We need to understand how these bonds are actually traded and how these things are happening on the ground as we build a regulatory system around it,” Crenshaw said.

SEC Commissioner Elad Roisman, a Republican, added that “there is still a lot we can do when it comes to fixed income.”

Retail investors, Crenshaw said, “have more exposure, perhaps more than anyone else, to municipal bonds, both directly and indirectly through various funds.”