Nobody's perfect. Requiring an investment adviser to indemnify its clients for any mistake that the adviser makes could easily bankrupt any small adviser doing business for a good-sized institutional client. A negligence standard may be particularly unfair as clients receive the benefit of mistakes in their favor, and are not required to net off positive mistakes (e.g., an adviser buys the wrong stock, but the stock goes up) against losses.

Institutional clients are perfectly…

A number of MSRB proposals would benefit corporate offerings as well, and FINRA should consider their imposition. In particular, the requirement that the syndicate manager inform all distributor participants when a security is "free-to-trade" (or that the offering is all sold) would benefit small and medium-sized firms participating in an offering.

While the Brookings report runs some 60 pages, plus 4 pages of footnotes, it may be summarized as follows: There is stuff that could go wrong in some way with the production, trading or ownership of crypto-assets; therefore, crypto-assets ought to be regulated in some unspecified way, which would make the bad stuff less likely to happen. (The other 59 7/8th pages, plus 4 pages of footnotes, amplify on this theme.)

To be chary of Mr. Massad's report is not to dispute that some…

One of the industry's most significant requests to Congress is that the government should acknowledge that the government is itself a material potential source of vulnerability in data protection. Put bluntly, information that is collected and stored by the government may be more accessible to hackers than the information stored by private parties. Given the vast quantity of information that may be collected by the government, a raid on the government's information could be a far larger haul…