From the perspective of a longtime industry participant, the extent to which FINRA may be properly viewed as a "self-regulatory" organization is fair to question.

gives the SEC tremendous authority over FINRA, including the right to reject rules adopted by FINRA, but also the authority to require that FINRA adopt rules. Further, the SEC has the authority to bring enforcement actions against FINRA (). As a result, FINRA and its employees must be concerned that, should they fail to…

This is another meaningful and positive step in the direction of financial regulatory policy. Historically (and not just under the Obama administration), financial regulators have overweighted their attention toward enforcement actions, perhaps because that is where they find glamour and glowing newspaper reports. But enforcement is just one aspect of financial regulation, and in the best of all possible worlds (not to downplay the eternal significance of keeping people honest), enforcement…

During his interim tenure, Acting Chair Piwowar is making significant efforts to return the SEC to its historical mission of enabling investors to make investment decisions on the basis of good corporate disclosure regarding facts of economic significance. These are necessary corrections to the course of an agency that had been used since the adoption of Dodd-Frank as an instrumentality of political partisanship without regard to the economic costs or the benefits of its rulemakings.

While the announcement of a study is not necessarily exciting, it is potentially very significant. For the last eight years, the regulation of the securities industry has been, as Chair Piwowar observes, heavily politicized. Interested legislators have taken the view that more regulation is inherently good, and that less regulation is inherently bad, without considering the actual cost or benefits of any particular item of legislation. If the discussion of appropriate regulation…