Partner
Norton Rose Fulbright US LLP
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
The Dealer Rule embodied three flaws that ran through virtually all SEC rulemakings during the past four years.
First, it was outside of the statutory authority of the SEC. (Indeed, some of the cases cited by the SEC in support of its authority were so strained that they damaged the credibility of the agency.) Second, the required cost-benefit analysis in the rulemaking was inadequate (at best) and a sham (at worst). For the Dealer Rule, the "analysis" of costs focused on…The CFPB was devised as an agency that would be largely independent of both the President and Congress—a power unto itself. Congress does not appropriate funds to the CFTC. Rather, the head of the CFPB could independently appropriate funds from the Federal Reserve.
There is no law that would require the new head of the CFPB to appropriate funds for the agency. So, if Mr. Vought decides to let the agency go bust, that would seem to be entirely consistent with the law as written and…
It is hard to assess the practical significance of this EO; i.e., how much it could change behavior at the regulators. Historically (meaning before the Biden-Gensler era at the SEC and the Obama-Gensler era at the CFTC), the SEC and the CFTC acted in a fairly non-partisan manner, meaning that it was somewhat unusual to have rules or enforcement actions approved by the majority party of the Commissioners over the dissents of the minority party. (There were exceptions to this, such as the SEC'…
Commissioner Crenshaw's claim that this SEC rule change is a blow to democracy is flawed on several bases.
First, democracies generally set the rules by which they are governed. In the case of the proxy rules, the rescinded interpretation was imposed by the federal government, albeit an elected federal government. The new interpretation is also being imposed by an elected federal government. So both the rescinded and the new interpretation are equally "democratic."
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