Query: is a brief suspension and a small fine under these circumstances sufficient for what is effectively a fraud?  

That said, the facts beg many questions, starting with, how good were these impersonations? Did the broker do both men and women? Did the broker do accents? (And, more broadly, are there still any ?)

One interesting aspect of the misreporting of net capital, in this case, is that the firm consistently understated its net capital by consistently overstating the haircuts required by its open contractual commitments.  

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.