Yellen: Too Soon to Say If Changes Needed to Address Market Volatility

Reuters
By Reuters
February 7, 2021Politics
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Yellen: Too Soon to Say If Changes Needed to Address Market Volatility
Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen speaks during a virtual roundtable with black chambers of commerce from across the country to discuss the importance of passing the American Rescue Plan at the South Court Auditorium on the White House complex in Washington on Feb. 5, 2021. (Nicholas Kamm/AFP via Getty Images)

WASHINGTON—U.S. Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen said on Sunday that it is too soon to say whether new policies or regulations are needed to deal with recent market volatility.

“We really need to understand exactly what happened and the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) is working hard to assemble a report that gives us the facts, and when we have them we can look at whether or not there were issues that need to be addressed through new policy or regulations,” Yellen told CNN’s “State of the Union” program.

A swarm of buying by amateur traders over the past two weeks sparked big moves in shares of companies such as video game retailer GameStop Corp that hedge funds had bet against. Some framed it as a battle between Wall Street and Main Street.

Yellen convened a meeting last week of the SEC, the Commodities Futures Trading Commission, the Federal Reserve Board, and the Federal Reserve Bank of New York to discuss retail trading and whether the U.S. government needed to take any action on the matter.

By Arshad Mohammed

NTD staff contributed to this report