Chief Legal Architect and a co-founder of Caffrey.AI
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
Will an institution that "works with regulators" to test new products be able to keep pace with changes in the market? Consider the difficulty of numerous legal questions that regulators elect not to answer even when their response effectively would be the law, and even when the absence of that response forces firms to take on legal risks. Will regulators truly be prepared to judge when business technology products are ready to be launched? (See also .)
In its analysis, DERA seemed not to differentiate between the use of derivatives for speculation and for hedging. Apparently, DERA assumed that the derivatives would be used only for speculation.
With respect to central clearing, the systemic risk on which regulators have focused is that clearinghouses will fail. However, the greatest risk created by central clearing as mandated by Dodd-Frank is this: in an attempt to save themselves from the risk of failure, clearinghouses could use their ability to demand an unlimited amount of initial margin from clearing member participants and so drain needed liquidity from the financial system. In other words, clearinghouses likely would save…
While one cannot say that there has been a flood of enforcement actions in which the activities of municipal officials have been scrutinized, there is enough to make it clear that the SEC is paying attention.