Historically, FINRA's mark-up rules had not applied to government securities, either because the SEC was deferring to the authority of Treasury, or because of a more general concern that applying any requirements to government transactions would damage the liquidity of the market. While there are certainly many places where legitimate concerns of bad rules damaging the market should be taken very seriously, this is not one of them. There is no reason that retail investors should not be…

The release of the report is particularly timely given the .

This is a substantial report. The tone of the report is moderately negative. One of the report's underlying themes is "the potential unintended consequences of financial regulation and financial stability policies" (at 1). This theme amounts to a reluctant admission by the regulators that certain policies were either ill-considered or pushed too far.

The mandate to force derivatives into central counterparties ("CCPs") is the most obvious example of new regulatory requirements that…

Commissioner Piwowar's dissent from the proposal of the rule is well-reasoned. The SEC does not have adequate information needed for proper analysis of the proposal at the current time.

As the Commissioner argues, the SEC justifies the proposed derivatives framework as an "exemption" from Section 18 of the Investment Company Act ("Capital Structure of Investment Companies"), even though the SEC is in fact limiting behavior that it has previously sanctioned. It is not at all obvious…