If the SEC is trying to improve the public willingness to invest in smaller companies, it should focus less on how the securities trade and more on the availability of information about these issuers; e.g., investment research. The outcome of the early 2000s enforcement actions over broker-dealers producing research reports tainted by conflicts of interest were that the regulators adopted rules that significantly raised the costs of producing research and simultaneously deprived firms of a…

authorized the FDIC to act not only as the liquidator of banks, but also as the liquidator of other large institutions, such as broker-dealers, that might fail. Given that the FDIC has no experience overseeing these institutions, or with the types of transactions that they enter into, or how they manage their funding, or hold their assets, it seems to be extraordinarily wishful thinking on the part of Congress to believe that the FDIC could step in during a crisis and manage a large failing…

It is interesting that Governor Brainard describes Libra as a "stablecoin," as that uses the term rather broadly. Historically (if that is a word that can be used in connection with digital currencies), stablecoins were linked to a fixed amount of a single currency (although the term also could be applied to a digital currency linked to a fixed amount of multiple currencies or assets). Unlike these "traditional" stablecoins,…