Keynote Remarks at the 2026 Reagan National Economic Forum

Good morning, ladies and gentlemen. And thank you, Fred [Ryan], for your generous introduction. Before I begin, I should like to take a moment to recognize what a profound privilege it is for me to address the Reagan National Economic Forum.

Prior to sharing a few reflections, I must note that the views I express here today are my own as SEC Chairman and do not necessarily reflect those of the SEC as an institution or of my fellow Commissioners.

There is something quite fitting about gathering on a California morning such as this one, because it calls to mind a few of President Reagan's most enduring words: "Morning in America." And nowhere are those words more at home than here - in this library, a fixed monument to a free-market legacy. At its opening ceremony in 1991, President Reagan articulated his hope that the library would become "a dynamic intellectual forum where scholars interpret the past and policymakers debate the future."[1] Today, I believe that we are proving that his hope was well placed.

With that in mind, I do not take lightly the moment in which I stand before you, especially in this milestone year as the United States approaches its 250th anniversary - an occasion that invites not merely nostalgia but a renewed resolve.

A resolve like that of President Reagan's - to restore the ideals of our forebears: that the government is not meant to control a people, but to set them free to flourish. To prove, again, that America's best days are never behind her.

It was this vision that won hearts across America in the 1980 election. But vision alone does not renew a nation. What set President Reagan apart was something rarer: an instinctive understanding of a people weary from the Carter years and starved of hope - and an extraordinary ability to rekindle it.

On the tail of his landslide victory, crossing New York City in a motorcade, he noted in a diary entry that "one thing was unusual and very humbling. The streets were lined with people as if for a parade... They cheered and clapped and I wore my arms out waving back to them." Then he concluded with a somber conviction: "I keep thinking this can't continue and yet their warmth and affection seems so genuine I get a lump in my throat. I pray constantly that I won't let them down."[2]

And today we assemble together because he did not. Because his belief in the "miracle of the marketplace"-and in the American people-pulled our nation up from the ashes of despair and placed it on a firm path toward renewal.

Miracle of the Marketplace

As a young lawyer, I witnessed some small measure of that renewal firsthand. In the summer of 1982, I worked in New York, and by 1984, my career had carried me back there. By that time the deep malaise of the Carter years had finally sunset, and morning in America, as Reagan hailed it, had dawned.

As I navigated the city, I recall a certain palpability to the promise of a new day. A new energy resounded through the streets. A rebounding economy was reviving the hearts and minds of many who had lost faith in - or at least doubted - America's future.

It was a transformation that President Reagan understood at its root. In his first year as President, he expressed his core beliefs about free enterprise. "Trust the people," he told a crowd from the World Bank and IMF. "Countries that have achieved the most spectacular, broad-based progress are neither the most tightly controlled, nor the biggest in size, nor the wealthiest in natural resources. No, what unites them all is their willingness to believe in the magic of the marketplace."[3]

"The magic of the marketplace." It was not so much a memorable alliteration as it was-and is-an empirical truth. Indeed, President Reagan understood that the greatest weapon to end the Cold War was not a strong military fist alone, but the invisible hand behind it-free markets lifted by a free people.

That philosophy traveled further than any of us had imagined. Thirty-eight years ago today, in fact, President Reagan embarked on Air Force One for his first visit to the Soviet Union. He took to his diary that evening and recorded that when he walked outside the Ambassador's residence in Moscow, "It was amazing how quickly the street was jammed curb to curb with people-warm, friendly people who couldn't have been more affectionate."[4]

A short account, yet one that symbolizes the sweeping reach of President Reagan's ideology, crossing the Iron Curtain before he ever did.

Years before he set foot on Soviet soil, President Reagan's free-enterprise philosophy had been steadily permeating a people suffocating under the weight of communism. His economic "offensive strategy" was loosening the grip of its leaders. And the American free-market prosperity that he unleashed kept compounding the economic pressure-until finally the Berlin Wall fell and communism collapsed, all without any troops marching into Moscow.

In the end, the most powerful army that President Reagan deployed was an idea.

The lesson that he left us is not an historical artifact; it is an archetype: Free markets do not just create wealth. They generate gravity, pulling people toward them-across oceans, across ideologies, and as President Reagan proved, even across the Iron Curtain.

So much so, that after the Berlin Wall fell, countries across the former USSR and Eastern Europe began building market economies out of the rubble of central planning. In turn, more wealth has been created since the wall fell than in all prior human history.

In many respects, President Reagan's belief in free markets inspired - and still underpins - my own. As a young graduate, I watched as the Soviet and communist system of central planning collapsed under the weight of its own contradictions, while President Reagan's America empowered its citizens to innovate, to invest, and to build wealth within predictable and enforceable legal frameworks.

President Reagan held that our markets affirm the dignity of the human spirit and liberate its potential as no other alternative can. He believed, as do I, that markets, structured properly, can unleash the might of American dynamism as no monarch or government ministry possibly could.

But principles do not preserve themselves. And to maintain their might, markets require rules that are clear enough to guide but restrained enough not to suffocate.

Where The SEC Has Been

Shortly after his re-election victory, President Reagan became the first-and remains the only-sitting president to ring the opening bell at the New York Stock Exchange. He opened his remarks that morning with a characteristic clarity: "I'd like to say a few words about where this country's been, and where we'll be going from here."[5]

Today, to echo President Reagan, I should like to say a few words about where the SEC has been, and where we will be going from here.

Perhaps no comedic line better captures President Reagan's philosophy than one so beloved that it practically became a catch phrase, which you can probably recite with me: "The nine most terrifying words in the English language are: I'm from the Government, and I'm here to help."

Over my three tours at the SEC, I have discovered six equally terrifying words: "We should create another disclosure requirement."

Like President Reagan, I have come to understand the challenge of inheriting a regulatory environment gripped by government control that inhibited investment and punished success. In his inaugural address, President Reagan made clear a doctrine that he held that I also embrace today, that "Government can and must provide opportunity, not smother it; foster productivity, not stifle it."[6]

For context, Congress has tasked the SEC with three mutually reinforcing aims: to protect investors; maintain fair, orderly, and efficient markets; and facilitate capital formation. But seized by a sort of "regulatory adventurism," past Commissions constructed around those three pillars a thicket of obligations that were unmoored from any of them.

As a result, the SEC's disclosure regime became conscripted to serve interests beyond those of the Supreme Court's objective standard of the reasonable investor. And the path to going public grew so costly, so litigious, and so politically fraught that countless entrepreneurs chose to remain private or to list elsewhere. The agency charged with stewarding the world's greatest capital markets had become, in many ways, an imposing obstacle to them.

Indeed, as our disclosure and general regulatory burden expanded, the number of our public companies has dwindled. From the time that I left the SEC as a staff member in 1994, to when I returned as Chairman just over a year ago, the number of companies listed on the U.S. exchanges had fallen by roughly 40 percent - a decline that represents more than a data point; it is a lost opportunity for workers and savers to share in the prosperity of the next generation of American enterprise.

This regulatory overreach proved equally as damaging to digital asset innovation. The agency that I inherited had become defined - distinguished, even - by a regulatory hostility that pushed digital asset ventures overseas. Its driving philosophy seemed to be that the new technology itself - rather than malign individuals who might exploit it - was sinister and suspect and must be stamped out accordingly. As a result, innovators made the only rational choice. They left.

But - like President Reagan - when presented with this decline, under President Trump's leadership we have a duty to reverse it. And I am pleased to report that we are equal to the task.

For President Reagan, it was "morning in America." For us, it is a "new day at the SEC."

Where The SEC Is Going

President Reagan did not tinker around the edges of a broken system. Rather, he returned it to first principles at its core. And that is precisely the path that this Commission is charting.

First, we are advancing our regulatory posture to bring it into alignment with the world as it is, rather than as it was when many of our rules were first written.

As I alluded to earlier, under the previous administration, innovators found that engaging with the SEC quickly gave way to getting investigated by it. The market rendered its verdict, and an entire generation of digital asset innovation developed outside the United States.

So, over the past year, this SEC has moved purposefully on President Trump's goal of making America the crypto capital of the world. First, we launched Project Crypto-now a joint effort with the Commodity Futures Trading Commission-to modernize our rules and regulations to facilitate markets' moving on-chain. Building on this initiative, we recently delivered long-overdue clarity for market participants that distinguishes which digital assets are considered securities, and which are not. Finally, among other measures underway, we are advancing work on a forthcoming innovation exemption for tokenized listed securities and taking steps to clarify how onchain trading systems fit within existing regulations.

Now, the SEC's advancement of modernized rules is only as purposeful as the clarity with which we apply them.

Indeed, jurisdictional ambiguity can stifle innovation just as surely as ill-devised regulation - and for too long, it has. So after decades of fragmented oversight and overlapping authorities, CFTC Chairman Mike Selig and I have ushered in a new era of harmonization between our two agencies, replacing what I call a regulatory no-man's land with a field of fertile ground for innovation to take root and flourish - and providing market participants the clear path forward that they have long called for.

Lastly, perhaps nowhere is our forward ambition more evident than in our resolve to transform the SEC rulebook.

As I mentioned previously, over time, many disclosure requirements that began as a framework to illuminate have become instruments to obscure. In losing sight of materiality as its north star and accumulating new rules without excising the extraneous, the agency steadily built a disclosure labyrinth so complex and costly that going and staying public became less and less compelling.

So, we are moving decisively to Make IPOs Great Again. Building upon our recent proposal to afford companies the flexibility of quarterly or semiannual reporting cadences, last week we put forward two rule proposals that would further reduce the burdens of being a public company, by recalibrating disclosure requirements and making it easier for companies to access the public markets quickly and when market conditions are most favorable. And I am pleased to announce that today, we have proposed the rescinding of the prior administration's ill-advised climate rule - retethering our rulebook to the simple principle that the SEC exists to serve all investors, not to advance an agenda of the politicized few with axes to grind or business models to aggrandize.

Now, as substantial as they are, the reforms that I have outlined amount to a beginning, not a summation. Across every dimension of our mandate, the SEC has reclaimed its course - and is moving forward with equal parts rigor and restraint.

Conclusion

Under my leadership, I intend that the Commission work to ensure that the United States is well-positioned to seize on the excitement for economic opportunity that President Trump's pro-growth policies have inspired - and to build upon the decades of economic strength that the Reagan Revolution ignited.

When he took the oath of office, President Reagan inherited a despondent nation wandering in economic desolation, with no guiding light to lead it out. But over eight years, his administration achieved an unrivaled turnaround, transforming a once barren land into a beacon of prosperity.

Of course, he left America not merely richer, but more itself - more confident in what free people and free markets can accomplish together.

The resulting optimism revived not only the spirit of the American people, but also the economy that they helped to reconstruct - yielding twenty million new jobs and significant declines in unemployment, inflation, and the prime interest rate alike.[7]

Today, we share in that success, but no less in the worldview that kindled it: that by trusting a free people to participate in free markets, we can beget decades of economic prosperity for generations to come.

So, let me close where I began - with the words that President Reagan spoke 35 years ago in this very place.

"For 10 years after we summoned America to a new beginning, we are beginning still... With each sunrise, we are reminded that millions of our citizens have yet to share in the abundance of American prosperity. Can't we pledge ourselves to a new beginning for them?... May every day be a new beginning and every dawn bring us closer to that shining city upon a hill."[8]

Indeed, 45 years after President Reagan summoned America to a new beginning, we are beginning still. On the cusp of 250 years of our Republic, and at the dawn of a new Golden Age under President Trump, the question before us is not whether the American people possess the ambition or the ability to lead our nation toward new beginnings. It is whether we, as regulators, possess the will to let them.

In this new day at the SEC, I am confident that we do - and that by preserving the promise of our capital markets for the next quarter millennium, we will heed the call to carry our nation ever closer to that shining city upon a hill.

So, ladies and gentlemen, I am grateful, once again, for the opportunity to participate in this Forum. Thank you very much for your attention. And I look forward to the work ahead of us. Thank you.