“I don't think quarterly reporting is going to change for our top names anytime soon,” Clayton said Thursday at an event hosted by the Bipartisan Policy Center in Washington. “It was good of the president to raise it,” he said, adding that it could make sense to ease the requirements for smaller companies.

Trump urged the SEC to study the issue in an Aug. 17 tweet, asserting that switching public companies to biannual profit reports from quarterly disclosures could cut costs and create jobs. The president's comments mirrored those of business groups, which have long argued that requiring companies to reveal their financial health four times a year fuels Wall Street's misguided obsession with short-term benchmarks.