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Steven Lofchie is the Chief Legal Architect and a co-founder of Caffrey.AI, an AI platform built for law firms, banks, and the financial regulatory industry. He is also a partner at Norton Rose Fulbright, where he advises financial institutions on securities laws, the Commodity Exchange Act, and broker-dealer regulation. Ranked by Chambers USA every year since 2007, he is the author of “Lofchie’s Guide to Broker-Dealer Regulation,” long considered the leading treatise on the subject.

Recent Articles & Comments

There are a lot of tables in this new Report. It would be interesting to know who finds the information useful, which of the tables they find useful and what is the use case. Publishing information (and more importantly collecting it) that has no use case does not serve a public interest; it's just an expense.  

Here are some relevant questions: What is the "large benefit" that investors, issuers, economists, academics and the public at large will receive from this data?…

This case is not about the question of whether digital assets are "securities."  One can assume that they are securities.  

There is a fundamental problem that runs through SEC rulemaking under the current administration. It is the agency's apparent indifference to the differences between types of financial products and their impacts. One example is the net capital rule. To the extent that the SEC analyzes the impact of the net capital rule on entities required to register…

In response to Commissioner Peirce's argument that the SEC heaps regulatory costs on small companies, which has been a driver in the decline of public companies, Commissioner Lizárraga's argument is essentially: "well, it could have been even worse." At least that response may be true. In a recent statement, SEC Chair Gensler blamed the decline over almost thirty years in exchange-listed companies as being a consequence of the war in the Ukraine and/or the pandemic. (See .)

Regulators seem to believe that central clearing eliminates risk. In many cases, it simply moves risk, and it may even increase it. The fact that CCPs can always demand margin means that an end result of CCPs obtaining more margin is that they keep themselves solvent by sucking liquidity out of the system for everyone else. If CCPs are to be risk reducing for the system as a whole, it is necessary that their discretion to demand margin should be limited, and the way in which they compute…