The title of the hearings, "Wall Street's Cop Is Finally Back on the Beat," says it all: financial markets and market participants are bad, and fines are coming.

The individual bills cited seem largely intended to encourage litigation or lay the grounds for enforcement actions.

Whatever problems there may be with SPACs, legislation fixing the "promote" at 5 percent is completely arbitrary and premature. The SEC has plenty of authority to regulate SPACs, and FINRA has plenty of…

Commissioner Peirce raises basic questions: Do investors select mutual funds based on their returns or on how they vote? If investors select funds based on their returns, this information is irrelevant, and counterproductive in that it simply raises the cost of doing business.

If the SEC believes that disclosure of proxy voting is important to at least some investors, but likely not all, the SEC could propose a voting format and allow those funds that wished to do so to follow the…

Chair Gensler's remarks are mostly critical of SPACs. He suggests that "small businesses considering going public via SPACs [must consider] whether it is the best approach for the target company" (as if the many firms choosing to go public in this way were making an ill-informed decision). On the other hand, he says that it is "worth considering what we have learned from SPACs and direct listings, and whether there are any changes that might be appropriate for traditional IPOs." If the SEC…

The SEC should eliminate entirely the limit on the number of investors in funds. The size limit simply serves to prevent smaller investors from having access to the Section 3(c)(7) funds that institutional investors typically invest in. The result is not to protect retail investors; it prevents them from piggybacking off the indirect protections that they would receive from being able to rely on the due diligence and other oversight provided by larger investors.