They want to take away the one rule that lets a man who will never read a balance sheet find out what is happening to the money he cannot watch himself, and they are calling it modernization. Tzachi Zach, an accounting professor at Ohio State University, reports at United Press International that the Securities and Exchange Commission is moving to let registered companies report their earnings every six months instead of every three — a mandate in place since 1970 — over the largest public comment response in the agency’s history: more than 280,000 letters, more than 99% of them opposed. Chair Paul Atkins has indicated the commission is pressing ahead anyway. A record of opposition this size, from the people the rule exists to protect, is not a formality to be noted and set aside. It is the argument.
The case for the change deserves its strongest form, and I will give it. The quarterly cadence was born in 1970, and it has unquestionably trained boards and managers to manage to the calendar; the agency’s stated aim — to “promote longer-term planning rather than a short-term fixation on earnings” — is a real aim, not a lobbyist’s fig leaf. Compliance costs money, and $200,000 a year per firm is not nothing across the system. And the reformers are probably right that most large issuers would keep some quarterly cadence even if given the choice — market discipline would do much of the work. Every one of those points is true. None of them answers the question that actually decides this.
The question is not whether short-termism is a problem. The question is what happens to the people who cannot afford to be wrong about a company’s health. One of the comments Zach quotes is from a woman whose husband worked for Enron: “We lost most of our retirement savings when their fraudulent activity came to light… We knew many retirees who ended up working into their 80’s. Quarterly reporting is a gate keeper. Keep it.” That sentence is the whole argument, and it is not answered by compliance arithmetic. A gatekeeper is not a cost center. It is the thing standing between a man’s working life and somebody else’s fraud.
Consider what has changed since 1970 in the one respect that matters here: the ordinary American no longer owns a few shares and hopes. He owns his retirement through a 401(k) or an IRA — compulsory exposure, month after month, whether or not he checks a filing, whether or not he could. That is not a consumer making a discretionary purchase. That is a saver under a duty he did not choose, holding a claim on companies he will never visit, in a market he does not have the leisure to police. For half a century the disclosure rule has been the substitute for his absence: the state requiring, at regular intervals, that those who hold other people’s savings say what is true. Property is real, and I will defend it against every socialist who has ever lived. But property is not an absolute — it answers to the people whose claims on it the owner has taken in hand. A quarterly report is one of the ordinary, unglamorous instruments by which that obligation is kept.
And notice what the market itself is saying, because the reformers are arguing past it. SIFMA, the broker-dealers’ own trade group, warned the agency that the estimated savings “could be offset or outweighed by an increase in the cost of capital as investors demand higher risk premia for less timely information.” Federated Hermes, an asset manager, warned that issuers electing semiannual reporting may face “signaling risks,” with effects on analyst coverage and cost of capital. The SEC’s own Investor Advisory Committee — independent by design — found that “the evidence does not support the view that short-termism is a major problem for U.S. public companies today, nor is there strong evidence to support the view that costs for public companies would be significantly reduced.” The industry’s money managers, the broker-dealers, and the agency’s own independent adviser have all said, in their own words, that the savings are speculative and the costs are real. When the people closest to the transaction testify against it, that is not obstruction. That is the record.
What the agency proposes to do with that record is the part that should stop a conservative cold. On September 30, 2026, the commission floated a procedural change that would let this rule clear with only two commissioners’ votes — two, after two Democratic seats were left vacant and a third about to open. A threshold is not a formality. It is the minimum number of consciences a republic requires before it may rearrange the terms on which its citizens hold their savings. Lower it to the number of votes you have, and you have not modernized a rule; you have announced that a record-setting wall of objection from the people being regulated over counts for less than the convenience of the people being relieved of the duty.
I spent years in the pits and the towers above them, trading claims on crops I would never grow, for men who never thought about the men in the field. I know what a market looks like when information is rationed on purpose: it does not get more efficient. It gets more expensive for the people at the bottom of it and more profitable for the people at the top. That is not a theory. It is the reason the disclosure rule was written in the first place.
So here is the counter-model, and it is not complicated. Keep the gatekeeper. If the agency genuinely believes short-termism distorts American companies, the answer is not to hide the numbers for an extra ninety days; it is to make disclosure mean more than a single number — require what the Investor Advisory Committee’s evidence supports, let the 280,000 comments be answered on their substance rather than their volume, and refuse the two-vote maneuver as the shortcut it is. A movement that calls itself the party of property, of the family, of the ordinary man’s stake in his own country does not get to hand the ordinary man a longer blindfold and call it liberty. The widow’s gatekeeper has held for fifty-six years. Leave it standing.