Governor Barr's remarks seem a substantially overgeneralized way of looking at market events. Was the stock market crash of 1929 really about deregulation, not about the money supply? Was Dodd-Frank really about derivatives, or was it about the real estate market?

In any case, regulatory arguments should not be about, "should we have more rules or less?" They should be about, "is this particular rule justified, given its relative costs and benefits?"

This is a positive development, at least for integrating the use of AI in credit and other consumer-related decisions. So long as regulators took the view that any disparity had to be fully explainable, the use of AI was inherently problematic, because AI is inherently something of a blackbox and thus its "decisions" are not fully explainable.  

Under the prior administration, the SEC seemed to take the view that any asset represented in digital form was per se a security. The new SEC has rejected that expansive definition of "security" and said that any individual financial instrument must be specifically analyzed as to its appropriate treatment.  

While there has been a 180 degree change in the SEC's position, it is not from: everything is a security to nothing is a security. The 180 degree change is from a…

Regulation may be a major factor in driving the securities business from being conducted away from broker-dealers and into investment advisers. (See, generally, .) 

A firm that intends to offer customers any personalized advice is generally better off doing so as an investment adviser. Whether this is good or bad may be open to debate; more worrisome is the trend toward investors receiving their advice from social media.  

The one number that really jumps out is the…