The Advocate's report provides a good amount of data as to the various provisions under the securities laws by which issuers raise capital; i.e., Rule 506 private placements vs. registered offerings. The report both emphasizes the importance to the economy of facilitating the ability of small businesses to raise capital and the increasing difficulties of doing so; e.g., the diminution in the number of community banks and the reduced amount of research that broker-dealers produce in regard to…

LIBRA was a poorly conceived project. It was a non-starter in the United States because it created multiple issues under the securities laws and the tax laws (not to mention a host of political issues). As Governor Brainard recognizes implicitly, LIBRA was not intended as a "stablecoin"; its value was linked to a variable, dynamic basket of currencies, so it would not have been stable.

The products that are genuinely powerful are true "stablecoins" that are linked to the dollar or…

A common issue underlies both this debate over the expansion of the definition of "accredited investor" and the debate over the expansion of broker-dealer fiduciary obligations to their customers.

That issue concerns the competence of individuals to make investment decisions. One side argues that individual investors are stupid and can't be trusted to evaluate information. (There is no shortage of evidence that individuals are ill-informed about the markets, economics, politics, the…

The political momentum towards the various states adopting their own fiduciary or quasi-fiduciary standards applicable to broker-dealers making recommendations to their clients appears somewhat inexorable, even if not well advised.

It is difficult to see how the economics work for a broker-dealer to make recommendations to individual clients, get paid only a transaction commission, and be deemed to be subject to a "fiduciary standard of utmost care." See Cadwalader Memorandum: . That…