This is quite sad, though I'm sure many will fail to see her political power abuse and only the end result.
Still, Matt Levine laughs at the notion of trying to force an agenda through via an industry agency.
http://www.bloombergview.com/articles/2015-06-15/senators-think-stock-buybacks-might-be-manipulative
"The SEC is not especially in the business of regulating what companies do with their money. If you are a public company and you want to spend your money on paying your employees or developing a new car or building a big headquarters or giving it back to your shareholders, that is up to you, not the SEC."
"The proposals to prevent buybacks using SEC rules just seem very ... political. There seems to be a problem here, and the problem is that large public U.S. companies are investing less in the real economy than they used to. Perhaps that is because more investment is beingdone by private companies, and those companies find it less attractive to go public. Then you could solve the problem by making it more attractive to go public; alternatively, you could declare it not a problem, because those private companies are not exactly lacking for capital and opportunities. Or perhaps the cause is that investors are too short-term-oriented or economic conditions are too uncertain or managers are too risk-averse or something else, I don't know. If those are the causes, you'd want to go address them. But those are hard problems for a government to address. They're hard problems for anyone to address -- they're just hard -- but they're particularly hard to address by rules. You can't just command innovation."
Still, Matt Levine laughs at the notion of trying to force an agenda through via an industry agency.
http://www.bloombergview.com/articles/2015-06-15/senators-think-stock-buybacks-might-be-manipulative
"The SEC is not especially in the business of regulating what companies do with their money. If you are a public company and you want to spend your money on paying your employees or developing a new car or building a big headquarters or giving it back to your shareholders, that is up to you, not the SEC."
"The proposals to prevent buybacks using SEC rules just seem very ... political. There seems to be a problem here, and the problem is that large public U.S. companies are investing less in the real economy than they used to. Perhaps that is because more investment is beingdone by private companies, and those companies find it less attractive to go public. Then you could solve the problem by making it more attractive to go public; alternatively, you could declare it not a problem, because those private companies are not exactly lacking for capital and opportunities. Or perhaps the cause is that investors are too short-term-oriented or economic conditions are too uncertain or managers are too risk-averse or something else, I don't know. If those are the causes, you'd want to go address them. But those are hard problems for a government to address. They're hard problems for anyone to address -- they're just hard -- but they're particularly hard to address by rules. You can't just command innovation."