Steven Lofchie is a Partner based in New York. He advises financial institutions and corporate clients on the securities laws and the Commodity Exchange Act, with particular focus on the regulation of broker-dealers, swap dealers, investment funds and other market intermediaries. Steven's transactional practice focuses on securities credit and derivative transactions.

Recent Articles & Comments

How is it that a Congress that adopted Dodd-Frank and an administration that pushed for the DOL fiduciary rule (both very heavy regulatory measures) could also adopt the JOBS Act (which, in many ways, is extraordinarily deregulatory)? The contrast between the philosophies of the JOBS Act (buyer beware) and the DOL fiduciary rule (fiduciary mandate) is stark. Given the passage of time, and experience with the JOBS Act, there is certainly no reason that it should not be re-examined.…

Note that  refers to "spouses." Firms should consider whether they want to adopt a different standard; e.g., concerning significant others sharing a household.

From a constitutional standpoint, the CFPB is a very odd agency, subject to the control of neither the President nor Congress.

The fact that a person may (or may not) support the policies of the CFPB should be divorced from the question of whether one supports the manner in which the CFPB operates. If the President cannot remove the head of the CFPB, then what is to prevent this President or future Presidents, assuming that they have majority control of Congress, from establishing…

One can take issue with any number of the assertions made in this letter, but the most obviously questionable assertion is that the financial industry supports the rule. It is true that those firms that believe that the rule benefits them may support it, but if it were true that the industry generally supported the rule, then there would not be three lawsuits and the rule would not have been delayed. Likewise, that a court found that DOL had authority to adopt the rule is actually quite…