A good portion of the SEC's adopting release is taken up by explaining that the rule as adopted is not as burdensome as the version that was proposed. That is certainly correct. To put this in a somewhat more jaundiced way, there were aspects of the rule proposal that were so burdensome and so inconsistent with market practice (for example, real time reporting of stock loans) that they should never have made it into any proposal.  

Even this modified version of the rule proposal…

If the disclosure requirements are intended to provide benefits to investors, but the buy side is not supportive of the rule because it is overly burdensome, shouldn't that tell the SEC that it is not a good rule?

One may think of financially regulated products and entities as being in competition with unregulated products and entities. The benefit of the regulated products and entities is that they should be safer; the benefit of the unregulated products and entities is that they should produce higher returns by virtue of not having to bear regulatory costs and not being subject to the same level of regulatory restrictions. In this competition, regulated products and entities are steadily losing.…

From a policy standpoint, Comissioner Peirce's arguments against the rule amendments are quite strong and worth reading.  

Beyond the policy, one wonders whether the SEC might have been persuaded to back off from the more dramatic proposed amendments by the recent litigation against the SEC asserting that the private fund rule amendments were in violation of the Administrative Procedure Act. (See .) It is likely that various other SEC rule proposals will be the subject…