The Morning Risk Report: Trump's Pick for SEC Chairman Was Wall Street's Expert for Hire By David Smagalla

Good morning. The incoming chairman of the Securities and Exchange Commission built a career dealing with regulators- as their adversary .

Hired gun: Companies have hired Paul Atkins, a former SEC commissioner nominated as President Trump's next SEC chairman, to serve as an expert witness in at least 15 cases, according to his court disclosures, where he sometimes argued that law enforcers stretched the bounds of the law to target permissible corporate practices.

Change in approach: If his Senate confirmation proceeds as expected, Atkins will be in a position to bring that mentality to the commission, which could result in a retreat from enforcement actions that target regulatory gray areas.

What this could mean: David Rosenfeld, a former SEC enforcement lawyer, said the SEC under Atkins will likely pull back from filing lawsuits over disclosures that aren't indisputably important to investors. "Historically the SEC would not bring those cases, but they pushed further than they had under Gary Gensler," Rosenfeld said, referring to the Biden-era chairman known for his aggressive enforcement streak. Compliance

CFTC offers new incentives for companies to report their own wrongdoing.

Risk & Compliance Journal's Mengqi Sun reports that the Commodity Futures Trading Commission intends to give companies that voluntarily report potential misconduct more lenient penalties under a new enforcement advisory.

In a memo published on Tuesday, the derivatives market regulator issued new guidelines clarifying how it would give credit to a company that reports its own potential misconduct, cooperates with an agency investigation and addresses a reported issue.

A company that voluntarily reports potential wrongdoing and fully cooperates can receive a discount from the CFTC cutting the cost of a penalty to less than half the initially calculated amount in some cases.

Sen. Grassley opens inquiry into UnitedHealth's Medicare billing practices.

Sen. Chuck Grassley, chairman of the Senate Judiciary Committee, sent UnitedHealth Group Chief Executive Andrew Witty a letter demanding detailed information on the company's Medicare billing practices Monday.

The letter-which cited findings from a series of Wall Street Journal articles published over the past year-said "the apparent fraud, waste, and abuse at issue is simply unacceptable and harms not only Medicare beneficiaries, but also the American taxpayer."

Regulators are dropping a federal investigation into Uniswap Labs, creator of the world's largest decentralized crypto exchange, the company said on Tuesday.

Nippon Steel Chief Operating Officer Tadashi Imai said Tuesday that the company will discuss its planned acquisition of U.S. Steel with U.S. government officials, after former President Joe Biden blocked the takeover bid in January citing the threat it posed to national security.

The fight over online child safety is reigniting in state legislatures across the country this year, pitting social-media titan Meta Platforms against app-store giants Apple and Google in a dispute over who should verify the ages of users.

A federal judge has granted the Trump administration's request for a 60-day stay in the proceedings in the litigation against the Department of Labor's fiduciary rule, the latest twist in a long-running fight over how retirement advice should be regulated, according to Barron's. Risk

Alcoa CEO warns 100,000 U.S. industry jobs at risk due to proposed tariffs.

Approximately 100,000 U.S. aluminum industry jobs could be on the chopping block due to tariffs targeting the metal , according to Alcoa Chief Executive William Oplinger.

The Pittsburgh-based aluminum company estimates that a 25% tariff on aluminum imports would result in about 20,000 direct U.S. industry jobs being cut and as many as 80,000 indirect jobs being eliminated, Oplinger said Tuesday at the BMO Global Metals and Mining conference.

Cleveland-Cliffs Urges No Breaks on Steel Tariffs Trump to Consider Copper Tariffs

Apple pledges to fix transcription glitch that replaces 'racist' with 'Trump'.

Apple said it would fix a "bug" occurring on some iPhones in which its text-to-speech transcription software is sometimes replacing certain words with an "r" consonant-including "racist"- with "Trump."

The issue surfaced online-including on videos posted on social media-as users repeated the word "racist" while dictation software is being used in iMessage, Apple's texting software. The Wall Street Journal confirmed the error in multiple tests. It also occurred with other words.

President Trump has said he wants to see major economic deals with Moscow and is in advanced talks to put some together. But how viable a partner is Vladimir Putin's Russia, its economy weakened by years of Western sanctions, its population falling and the prospect of aggressive state intervention rarely far away?

President Trump's diplomatic embrace of Russia and threats to cut off military aid to Ukraine have caused alarm among European allies that the U.S. may no longer be willing to come to the continent's defense. But it also seems to be making progress toward a longstanding U.S. goal: jolting Europeans into spending more on their own defense .

Dockworkers voted in favor of a new labor deal that delivers a 62% pay raise and the promise of labor peace at ports from Maine to Texas for the next six years.

Taiwan detained a cargo ship and its eight Chinese crew members after an undersea fiber-optic cable was severed, in a stepped-up effort to police such incidents.

Central bankers should be wary of campaigning on climate change and should instead stick to their supervisory role, a top European rate setter said.

A Southwest Airlines plane nearly collided with a business jet at Chicago Midway International Airport Tuesday morning, the airline said, the latest in a string of episodes that have raised questions about aviation safety. What Else Matters Ukraine has agreed to a mineral rights deal with the U.S. that could be finalized as soon as Friday at a White House meeting between President Trump and Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky.

The Trump administration plans to create a registry for immigrants in the U.S. illegally to submit their personal information or face fines and prison time, according to documents including a draft regulation seen by The Wall Street Journal.

Republicans squeaked their budget blueprint through the House late Tuesday after party leaders swayed a handful of wavering members to back the framework for President Trump's tax, border and spending-cut agenda.

Pension collapses at church-affiliated hospitals and other organizations are upending retirees' plans .

Elon Musk's email to federal employees prompted angst, but lots of employers already use technology for continuous feedback on worker performance. About Us

Follow us on X at @WSJRisk . Follow Risk & Compliance editor David Smagalla @DSmagalla_DJ and reporters Mengqi Sun @_MengqiSun and Richard Vanderford @VanderfordRich .

You can reach us by replying to any newsletter, or email David at [david.smagalla@wsj.com].

This article is a text version of a Wall Street Journal newsletter published earlier today.

(END) Dow Jones Newswires

February 26, 2025 07:11 ET (12:11 GMT)

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