State Treasurers to Press to Separate NYSE Tasks

The National Assn. of State Treasurers will press New York Stock Exchange interim Chairman John S. Reed today to separate the NYSE’s regulatory and commercial functions, said NAST President Brian Krolicki.

Nevada state Treasurer Krolicki said his group was disappointed that the corporate governance plan Reed designed and NYSE members approved last week was weaker than they had anticipated. He cited the regulatory issue and the need for greater representation by investors on the NYSE board.

“The business and the regulatory aspects of the exchange should be separated,” Krolicki told reporters at an NAST conference in New York. “In this day and age it’s almost untenable for the two to exist side by side.”

Krolicki, who will lead a group of about a dozen of his colleagues at the NYSE bell-ringing ceremony this morning, said they planned to make another pitch for separating the exchange’s regulatory and commercial functions.

Treasurers who met with Reed last month to weigh in on governance “were delighted with what we heard at the time,” he said, but “there has been some reducing of what we heard.”

The new eight-person NYSE board elected last week has only one director -- TIAA-CREF Chief Executive Herb Allison -- whose firm represents investors.

From Bloomberg News