Senate schedules hearing for SEC nominee Jay Clayton

Source: Reuters

Wall Street dealmaking attorney Jay Clayton will appear before the U.S. Senate Banking Committee on March 23 for his confirmation hearing to become the next chairman of the Securities and Exchange Commission.

Clayton, an attorney at Sullivan & Cromwell who has worked on notable deals including the initial public offering of Alibaba Group Holding Ltd, is widely expected by SEC watchers to win Senate confirmation by a comfortable margin.

Nevertheless, Clayton is likely to face grilling by some of the more liberal-leaning Democrats on the panel, which include Elizabeth Warren and Sherrod Brown, the senior Democrat on the panel. Both have historically expressed skepticism about having people with close ties to Wall Street run the SEC.

The left-leaning Center for American Progress has drafted a 12-page guide laying out what it believes should be the main questions that lawmakers pose to Clayton

Read more: http://mobile.reuters.com/article/idUSL2N1GJ0UZ

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Oh boy, many Progressives are joining the bandwagon to object to this pick to head SEC. Organizations involved in the coalition to oppose Clayton include Allied Progress, Take on Wall Street, the Center for Popular Democracy and Public Citizen.

Due to main stream media burying yuuge stories, most orgs and people have NO idea how bad this Goldman Sachs crony pick, really is.

Jay Clayton comes from Sullivan & Cromwell; which is a firm that aided & abetted Goldman Sachs to rip off our eToys.com public company for hundreds of millions.

In my opinion, as a victim of Goldman Sachs bad faith acts in kur eToys related cases, nominating a Goldman Sachs affiliated party to be head of the waychdog agency of Goldman Sachs cases...is akin to picking Nitti's associate to have auspice over Al Capone cases.

This nomination is ABSURD

Link to tweet

Direct link to NY TIMES story by Joe Nocera, concerning Goldman Sachs rigging our eToys public offering.

https://mobile.nytimes.com/2013/03/10/opinion/sunday/nocera-rigging-the-ipo-game.html

As stated by NYT OpEd Joe Nocera

[div class"excerpt"]plaintiffs {eToys} charge that Goldman Sachs had a fiduciary duty to maximize eToys take from the I.P.O. Instead, Goldman purposely set an artificially low price, so that its real clients, the institutional investors clamoring for the stock, could pocket that first-day run-up. According to the suit, Goldman then demanded that some of those easy profits be kicked back to the firm. Part of their evidence for the calculated underpricing of eToys, according to the plaintiffs complaint, was that Lawton Fitt, the Goldman executive who headed the underwriting team and was thus best positioned to gauge the market demand, actually made a bet with several of her colleagues that the price would hit $80 at the opening. (Through a Goldman Sachs spokesman, Fitt declined to comment. Goldman denies that it did anything wrong, about which more shortly.)