This video can be viewed at the below link.[1]

Season’s greetings from all of us at the SEC!

Or should I say, S-E-Season's greetings.

You may have some New Year’s resolutions for 2024. Certainly, many of us do. Hobbies to try, places to see, rom-coms to binge.

Here at the SEC, we have three New Year’s resolutions:

First, to protect investors.

Second, facilitate capital formation.

And third, maintain fair, orderly, and efficient markets.

In 2024, as always, we are going to carry out these three parts of our mission, looking out for investors like you and people raising money called issuers.

That means working as a cop on the beat, stamping out misconduct, and ensuring that markets are fair.

It means preventing fraud, manipulation, and abuse lowers. This all lowers risk in the system, but it also protects investors and reduces the cost of capital. The whole economy benefits when we do that.

Further, we’ll continue to conduct our important examinations to promote compliance, prevent fraud, monitor risk, and inform policy. In 2024 examinations, our examinations function will focus on long-term priorities—like making sure advisers put investors’ interests first—as well as evolving risks, like artificial intelligence, like cybersecurity, and yes, like the crypto markets.

As technology and business models rapidly evolve, we too at the SEC need to update our rules of the road to keep pace with the markets of the 2020s. That’s how we make the markets maintain their efficiency, their competitiveness, their resiliency, and worthy of the public’s trust.

We have proposed a number of rules in the last few years. We’ve finalized many of them—like shortening the settlement cycle so you receive your cash when you sell stocks sooner, making money market funds more resilient, and yes, promoting the efficiency and competition amongst what’s called private fund advisers.

This year, we have more work to do, more items on the agenda that we may adopt through the year.

Like making the U.S. Treasury markets more efficient. Updating our stock markets—or equity market system—to make it more competitive. Or promoting cybersecurity in the financial market itself.

In 2024, ultimately, our New Year’s resolution is to make sure the markets work for you—the investor, the issuer—and not the other way around.

Now that’s some holiday cheer.