Senate Confirms Jay Clayton as SEC Chairman

Clayton now heads the agency that is "the primary cop on the Wall Street beat," Kelleher added.

Norm Champ, former head of the SEC's Division of Investment Management, told ThinkAdvisor in a recent interview that a big thrust of Clayton's agenda will be to reverse the trend of declining IPOs in the U.S.

"It's important to look at the face value of what the President and Jay Clayton talked about in the statement that nominated him: they both talked about getting on top of the decline in initial public offerings in the United States," Champ, partner in the Investment Funds Group at Kirkland & Ellis, told ThinkAdvisor. "So long term, we are seeing a decline in IPOs in the U.S. That's a very bad development."

Champ continued: "We need to make sure that people go public here because we need those companies on our exchanges; we need that liquidity in our markets. I take the president and Jay Clayton at face value that that is going to be the theme of the SEC for the next four years—to try to focus on corporation finance, remove some of the barriers to going public (there were a lot of things in Dodd-Frank that made it very difficult to be public)."

Indeed, the SEC's Division of Economic and Risk Analysis (DERA) and New York University's Salomon Center plan to hold a symposium May 10 in New York to take a look at data and explore the economic causes and consequences of the perceived weakness in the IPO market, as well as discuss ways to encourage more capital-raising through IPOs.