Finance

Warren Presses Wall Street Regulator to Explain Decline in Enforcement Actions

  • Fines levied by regulator dropped to half their recent level
  • Finra calls critics’ allegations of a pullback ‘dead wrong’
Senator Elizabeth WarrenPhotographer: Al Drago/Bloomberg
Lock
This article is for subscribers only.

Senator Elizabeth Warren is pressing the nation’s broker-dealer regulator, Finra, on its claim that success in kicking bad actors out of the industry explains why enforcement numbers have plummeted in recent years.

Fines levied by the Financial Industry Regulatory Authority have dwindled to half their recent levels, and the number of enforcement actions last year was the lowest in history, Bloomberg News reported in June. The regulator attributed the decline to improved rules and strategies to weed out repeat offenders.