New U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission Chairman Gary Gensler asked Congress on Wednesday for increased funding so his agency canhandle the rise of SPACs, cryptocurrencies and today’s “once-in-a-generation” level of traditional IPOs.
“The SEC oversees the nearly $100-trillion capital markets, [but] as our capital markets have grown … the SEC has not grown to meet the needs of the 2020s,” Gensler said inprepared remarksto a House Appropriations subcommittee.
The SEC chief said that even as SPACs, cryptos, IPOs and other financial instruments have expanded, his agency’s headcount has dropped some 4% in four years.
Gensler said the SEC’s enforcement division’s staff has decreased by 6%, while its corporate-finance unit has lost 20% of headcount in the past five years.
He warned that such staffing has shrunk even as new investment avenues have exploded. For example, Gensler said that 700 special purpose acquisition companies have filed for IPOs so far this year, with some 300 completed to date. That’s up from just 13 completed SPAC initial public offerings for 2016 as a whole.
The SEC chief added that the crypto market has grown to $1.6T from just $9B five years ago. And Gensler noted that U.S. markets are “in the midst of a once-in-a-generation wave of traditional initial public offerings.”
He said nearly 400 companies have filed for traditional IPOs so far this year, “rapidly approaching the number of companies that filed for public offerings in all of 2016.”
Gensler told Congress that companies have completed 118 IPOs to date in 2020 vs. 130 for 2016 as a whole. “At the current rate, I expect there will be more traditional IPOs than there were during the dot-com peak of 2000,” he said.
The SEC chief asked for an unspecified funding increase to deal with the new securities.
“The scope, scale, and complexity of our capital markets have continued to grow,” [but the SEC] is working with fewer staff than five years ago,” Gensler said. “As more Americans are accessing the capital markets, we need to be sure that the commission has the resources to protect them.”