Whether the U.S. government should issue a CBDC, and, if so, the privacy protections that should be associated with it, is an extraordinarily significant question—one that should be decided by legislators, not regulators. Legislators who purport to worry about the unreasonable exercise of executive powers should be particularly concerned about voting to grant such authority to the executive branch on a question of this magnitude.

This Order is arguably the most legally significant development during the Chair Gensler era with respect to digital assets. It is a concession that ether is not a security. And yet, to read the SEC's release approving the exchanges' listing applications, one might reasonably conclude that the SEC never had suggested, even remotely, that ether might be a security. Apparently, the topic did not deserve a sentence, not even a footnote.

"Like must be treated as like" is one of Chair…

Ongoing systematic violations of Rule 105 are simply foolish. The regulators have good technology, and this is a violation they are generally on the look-out for. For its foolishness, the firm lost all of its gains and paid a penalty of about 1.5x more. 

These margin rule amendments were a dozen years in the making. A significant part of the reason that they took so long to implement is that both regulators and the industry underestimated the operational complexity of making material changes to the SEC custody rules.

This is a lesson that the SEC and industry may learn again with the recently adopted SEC rules on the mandated clearing of many transactions in U.S. Government Securities, which likewise require significant changes to…