SEC: Gary Gensler has resigned, Mark Uyeda is the new Chairman

Yesterday, as promised, the President of the SEC Gary Gensler resigned. 

After Trump’s electoral victory, Gensler had promised to resign on the day of the new President’s inauguration, and so he did.

Trump has appointed Mark Uyeda as the new interim President.

Gary Gensler 

Gensler had been appointed Chairman of the SEC in April 2021 by Joe Biden. 

He was born in Baltimore, Maryland, in 1957, and at the end of the ’70s, he graduated in economics. 

In 1979, he was hired at Goldman Sachs, where he stayed for a full 18 years. At the time, he was involved in mergers and acquisitions.

Still at Goldman Sachs, he eventually became co-head of finance, responsible for controllers and treasury worldwide, so much so that Bill Clinton then chose him in 1997 as Assistant Secretary of the Treasury. 

From that moment, Gensler became an important state official in the economic and financial field close to the Democratic Party. 

In 1999 he became Undersecretary of the Treasury for National Finance, while in 2009 Barack Obama appointed him Chairman of the CFTC. 

The SEC of Gary Gensler and the fight against crypto

Under his leadership, the SEC has become increasingly hostile to the crypto sector. 

To tell the truth initially, in 2021, the SEC had not shown signs of wanting to tighten surveillance on crypto, even though at the end of 2020 under the presidency of its predecessor Jay Clayton the agency had sued Ripple for selling XRP as an unregistered security.

The real turning point of the SEC against the crypto sector came with the collapse of FTX, at the end of 2022.

It should be remembered that the founder of FTX, Sam Bankman-Fried, had used many billions of dollars of money deposited on the exchange by users to curry favor with U.S. politics by giving out many donations. Most of these donations went to politicians of the Democratic Party, who ended up distancing themselves from the crypto world when FTX failed and SBF was accused (and then convicted) of fraud. 

Therefore, it is especially in 2023 and 2024 that Gensler’s SEC tried in every way to put obstacles in the path of the crypto sector, but without success, as in the end the courts sided with XRP, Coinbase, and many other players in the sector accused by the agency. 

Gary Gensler resigns as Chairman of the SEC: room for Mark Uyeda

With the electoral victory of the Republican Donald Trump, things seem to change radically. 

In fact, not only has Gary Gensler himself resigned, but the first decision of the new president, namely to appoint Mark Uyeda as interim president, is already going in this direction. 

Uyeda has been a commissioner of the SEC since 2022, and since then he has consistently expressed strong criticism of the SEC’s highly repressive approach against the crypto sector during Gensler’s presidency. 

Uyeda was also appointed by Biden, but he is not a democrat. 

It should be noted that before being appointed as SEC commissioner by Biden, he was part of the agency’s staff for a full 15 years. Therefore, Biden’s choice was not political, given that Uyeda is from the Republican Party, but technical, promoting an expert technician to the role of commissioner. 

Uyeda is also a graduate in economics (in 1992), but he also has a second degree in law. 

Starting from 1995, he practiced as a lawyer, and it was precisely as a lawyer that he joined the SEC in 2006. 

He must therefore be considered a technical expert of the SEC, and the fact that unlike Gensler he is favorable towards cryptocurrencies speaks volumes about how the approach of the now former president can be considered ideological. 

The future

Uyeda was appointed by Trump as interim president. This means that he will be president in all respects but only until the appointment of the new president of the SEC. 

The new president of the Securities and Exchange Commission should indeed be Paul Atkins, but the procedure to reach his appointment is not immediate. Furthermore, Trump in these first weeks will have much more urgent issues to address, so the appointment of Atkins will likely be postponed to March or April. 

In the meantime, Uyeda should be an excellent substitute, also because he is as much a republican as Trump. 

It is expected that the new course of the SEC will be decidedly more favorable to the crypto sector, so much so that with Trump’s victory in November, and the subsequent announcement of Gensler’s resignation, the crypto market has in fact closed an era lasting about two years of great difficulties, and seems to have started a new one decidedly more optimistic.