The U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission today released its much-anticipated “Spring” regulatory agenda. The agenda removes more than a dozen items from the Fall 2024 agenda and adds nearly double that to the Spring 2025 agenda. The two proposed rules that remain from Fall 2024 had their titles (and substance) changed (e.g., the “Rule 144 Holding Period” became the “Rule 144 Safe Harbor” and “Foreign Issuer Reporting Modernization” became “Foreign Private Issuer Eligibility”).
As expected, the agenda focuses on topics consistently discussed at the roundtables and other public and private forums and meetings that the Commission has hosted since January. It focuses on expanding capital formation pathways for small and emerging companies, creating a clear roadmap for the issuance, custody and trading of crytpo assets, and on deregulation, including with respect to the Consolidated Audit Trail.
The agenda abandons focus areas of the prior Chair, including board diversity, ESG disclosures, cybersecurity, predictive data analytics, and certain legacy-market structure reforms. Many of the discarded items were in the final rule stage last Fall. The Commission previously announced in July that it was withdrawing those rules.
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