Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) Chairman Gary Gensler is used to ruffling the feathers of some of the most powerful men in finance, if not the planet. There’s his well-reported unpopularity with the crypto crowd, for one, and there’s noted disagreements with figures such as Marc Andreessen over whether AI could cause a market crash. But now he’s locking horns with Ken Griffin, the founder of market-maker Citadel Securities, the hedge fund Citadel, and the owner of the best annual performances in hedge fund history. The billionaire has adamantly opposed rule changes proposed by Gensler for the world’s greatest safe haven market: the multitrillion-dollar trading of Treasurys.
Griffin believes some of the SEC’s new rules could end up costing taxpayers tens of billions of dollars while raising borrowing costs for businesses. “The SEC is searching for a problem,” he told the Financial Times Sunday. The comments follow the hedge funder’s rebuke of Gensler at the Robin Hood Investors Conference in New York in late October, where he described the SEC chair’s regulatory efforts as “utterly beyond me.”
