How much of the SEC's focus on "disclosure" is driven by the interests of investors? Is it really true that corporations would better serve their investors if their disclosures spotlighted the risks of climate change, or does that proposed requirement reflect a political preference? If it is the latter, wouldn't most investors be more concerned about the risks that might arise from Brexit, Zika and other pandemics, governmental defaults on both national and municipal levels, aging…

Dodd-Frank's established standards for designating financial institutions as "systemically significant" are impossibly open-ended. They include ten factors that may be interpreted in nearly every way conceivable. These can be ignored entirely or considered along with other factors that are not specified in the legislation. Read literally, the standards give FSOC complete authority to improvise interpretations as it goes along. That is bad public policy. To grant such unfettered…

To the extent to which U.S. regulators impose burdensome requirements on domestic financial institutions and the customers of those institutions before European regulators follow suit, the United States will lose business. Such lost business is not regained easily, and regulators should not assume that it will return to U.S. firms once it has been lost. Establishing a swaps or financing arrangement can be operationally intensive: once customers have used systems frequently that allow them to…

The need for so-called coordination between CCPs evidences one of the negative consequences of both Dodd-Frank and mandatory clearing: materially increased interconnected risk through clearing members. Dodd-Frank (and similar legislation throughout the world) has resulted in fewer clearing counterparties, and these remaining counterparties, which now are smaller in number and larger in size, are each more connected with the other counterparties through the increased mandatory use of clearing…