Mary Jo White is Chair of the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission. The following post is based on Chair White’s recent keynote address to the International Bar Association Annual Conference. The complete publication, including footnotes, is available here. The views expressed in this post are those of Chair White and do not necessarily reflect those of the Securities and Exchange Commission, the other Commissioners, or the Staff.
It is my pleasure to participate in this year’s International Bar Association Annual Conference at the request of your president, David Rivkin, whom I first came to highly admire from our days as very young lawyers. He is a tremendous lawyer and leader. In reviewing your conference program, I was struck by the significant overlap with issues currently on the SEC’s agenda.
As the regulator of the world’s largest securities markets, and thousands of globally-active firms, the SEC is naturally very engaged in many issues that extend beyond the U.S. border. Indeed, the first speech I gave as Chair—after only three weeks on the job—was about the SEC as an international regulator, having spent a surprising amount of time on international meetings and issues. The centrality of international issues to financial regulation and the SEC has not changed during these last three and a half years.
