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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

Presumably, the banking regulators are paying a good bit more attention to reports of uninsured deposits in the wake of recent bank failures. Such deposits may be expected to flee very quickly in the case of a negative news event as to the relevant bank.  

What a complicated piece of legislation this is! It may be even more complicated than the regulation of swaps and security-based swaps under Title VII of Dodd-Frank. While the definition of "swap" under Dodd-Frank is arguably imprecise and overly broad, at least there was a pre-existing consensus as to what a swap is - and that consensus has largely governed conduct in the market, perhaps more than the definition in Dodd-Frank. In the case of digital assets that may or may not be securities…

It will be interesting to see whether Chair Gensler can receive bipartisan support for an increase in the SEC's budget given (i) that significant aspects of the Chair's rulemaking agenda  and (ii) the heavy criticism for the SEC's . (Not to mention, some  of his agenda by his fellow Commissioners.)

The SEC proposal to mandate clearing of many cash market and repo transactions involving Government securities has been the target of substantial criticism as costly and unnecessary. However, if the clearing agencies can improve the cross-margining between SEC- and CFTC-regulated products to reduce the margin requirements then the clearing mandate would become less painful.