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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

Rule 15c2-11 has been in existence for 50 years and never applied to debt securities. Applying a rule that was not intended for debt securities without any consideration of whether that is good policy is bad process. Delaying the application of the Rule, and "amending" the Rule by adding Annexes in a staff no-action letter, does not address the regulatory process issue or the public policy issue. If the SEC believes that it may be beneficial to apply Rule 15c2-11, or some variant thereof,…

In the wake of the failure of Archegos, the market was generally expecting the SEC to use its authority under SEA , as effectively amended by SEA Section 13(o) (which was adopted as part of Dodd-Frank) to include a requirement to count equity swap positions as constituting beneficial ownership. Instead, the SEC is proposing reporting requirements under SEA that are far broader than anticipated and would apply to swaps on debt securities on credit default swaps.

It is not clear that…

There may be no area in securities law that is so conceptually difficult to create sound regulation as with respect to money market funds. The central question is: how does one create a fund that maintains a fixed share value of , notwithstanding fluctuation in the value of the fund's asset, and yet avoid having investors redeem when they believe that the true value of the fund is less than ? So far, mission not accomplished.

Given the difficulty of the problem, Commissioner…

Chair Gensler's former tenure at the CFTC was notable, among other things, for party-line votes. His tenure at the SEC is off to a start that is the same, but more so. Baseball fans may remember a famous quote that "There is nothing quite so limited as being a limited partner of George Steinbrenner's." Perhaps Commissioners Peirce and Roisman can suggest at least one thing that is equally limited.