The shift in policy from the Biden SEC to the Trump SEC is profound. Under the prior administration, the SEC embraced a philosophy that regulation was equivalent to safety, and ignored its costs. Under the present administration, the SEC is embracing an approach that economic growth depends upon freeing up markets and market participants. With the new philosophy comes greater risk. Consider how much was lost (think FTX) as a result of the prior administration refusing to provide a workable…

Under Acting Commissioner Pham, the CFTC has made significant progress in cleaning up needless regulatory complexity.  

This enforcement action illustrates one of the most challenging problems that broker-dealers face in surveilling for manipulative trading: how is it possible to detect improper trading in an omnibus account for numerous undisclosed principals, when the broker-dealer has no definitive means to know which trades are for the same or related investors? It is a difficult problem, unless the foreign broker-dealer, through which the trades are submitted, is reasonably transparent and is fully…

The fact that this judicially-ordered settlement survived for over twenty years is a demonstration of how difficult the regulators and the courts find it to rescind any rule (or pseudo-rule in this case) once adopted. There is simply no justification for a judicial order to apply to a group of twelve firms twenty years after the relevant events.  

If the terms of the settlement were meaningful from a regulatory standpoint, they should have been applied to everyone. If the…