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

Yellen: Too Soon to Say If Changes Needed to Address Market Volatility
Janet Yellen speaks with FOX Business Network guest anchor Jon Hilsenrath in the Fox Washington Bureau in Washington on Aug. 14, 2019. Andrew Harnik/AP Photo
Reuters
Updated:

WASHINGTON—U.S. Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen said on Feb. 7 that it’s 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
The Epoch Times contributed to this report.