Tag Archives: regulation

Trade-Through Elimination

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The SEC’s trade rule, in effect for a bit over 20 years, requires trading platforms operating in the US to execute investors’ trades at the best price available across the market, even if that means one platform must go to another platform to execute the trade. The SEC wants to rescind that rule as no longer necessary. The SEC says,

Currently, the US equity markets are highly automated and interconnected and the Commission’s concerns expressed at the time of [the rule’s] adoption in 2005 regarding the lack of mechanisms to connect markets is no longer an issue[.]

The SEC now argues that (as paraphrased by The Wall Street Journal)

stockbrokers already have a strict legal duty to execute trades with the most favorable terms for their clients, making the trade-through rule superfluous.

The exchanges’ “legal duty” is all well and good, but then there are the enforcement costs for violations of that rule. These costs are incurred by the government (i.e., us taxpayers) from enforcing compliance with a case’s outcome, incurred by individual (and institutional) investors from raising a ruckus in the first place, and incurred as opportunity costs during the time between detection of a violation and final adjudication.

Then there’s the difficulty of detecting a violation in the first place, especially for retail investors.

The SEC also argues that rule rescission would save the platforms the cost of buy[ing] expensive market data feeds linked to a bevy of exchanges.

Yet, in order to satisfy that legal duty, the platforms still would need access to some version of those data feeds, or at least to the data in them, in order, in real time (which is microseconds in today’s interconnectivity), to identify that best price available.

This is a rule that should remain in effect. The cost to the platforms is trivial: $54.2 million to $77 million annually, compared with nearly $30 billion in aggregated US platform income. Violations of the trade-through rule, importantly, are far more easily detected, including by retail investors.

Yet Another Reason

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The European Union is moving toward passing legislation that would allow it to curb imports of heavily subsidized foreign products. The legislation doesn’t single out any particular nation; although, the Peoples’s Republic of China is infamous for such subsidies.

Those subsidies allow PRC businesses to sell their products at less than their cost of production in order to sell at lower prices than European businesses can due to their own, unsubsidized, costs of production. That allows the PRC to put those businesses out of business and to seize nearly all of the market share. In the aggregate, this cascades into steadily increasing PRC influence over European economies.

Naturally, the PRC wants to continue this domination, so it’s threatening countermeasures if Europe continues with the impudence of defending itself.

Chinese authorities could initiate anti-discrimination and supply-chain security investigations into the EU’s “overcapacity instrument,” a social media account run by China’s state broadcaster said Friday, citing unnamed sources.
If the EU advances the tool, China will take immediate action and deploy comprehensive countermeasures, it added.

Of course, that retaliation wouldn’t matter if Europe’s nations were doing no business with the PRC or with businesses domiciled there.

The PRC keeps providing reasons for discontinuing business with or within it. It’s time for the EU and for Europe’s nations individually to act on at least some of those reasons, for their own economic survival.

The Pope’s Encyclical

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The Wall Street Journal‘s editors are amused by the press’ response to Pope Leo XIV’s writ that warns of the dangers that Artificial Intelligence presents to the humanity of us all.

I’m amused by the Pope’s naïveté. He wrote this (as cited by the editors), for instance:

Some of what he writes is hard to dispute, such as that AI has “harmful uses, such as the manipulation of information or violations of privacy.”

So do the printing press and reporters since that machine’s invention engage in the harm of manipulating information—what they choose to write, what they choose to not write, how they choose to present either. So do the reporters, specifically, with the means they use to snoop out what they choose then to write about.

And

“There is also a subtler danger,” he writes, of AI “reflecting and reinforcing the stereotypes or ideological bias of their designers and developers.”

“Subtler dangers?” That’s the press and reporters here, too. Reporters today only write consistently with their preconceived notions and/or those of their employers, the press’ collection of editors and publishers. Particular stereotypes are blithely peddled where they support those preconceived notions or contradict the obviously wrong notions of those whom they oppose.

The Pope is on firm ground when he advises the flock—and the rest of us—on morality and the role of God in our lives. However, if he’s going to move from the general of morals and God’s Word to specifics like the tools we use, he would do well to at least be consistent. AI is in many respects, if not most, simply an extension of the printing press, the press industry, and reporters in the arena of information generation and dissemination.

Throw Money at it

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The letter-writer seems to be writing from the Left. Opening with Praise for Ohio’s Republican candidate for Governor Vivek Ramaswamy’s proposal for attacking Medicaid fraud, he quickly pivoted.

States need more funds to address fraud….

How typical.

No, States do not need more funds to combat and drastically reduce, much less “address,” fraud. Were States actually to get serious about combatting and reducing Medicaid, they’d uncover 10s of millions, if not billions, of dollars of fraud, and they’d recover significant percentages of those dollars. Those dollars then could feed back into the program to help keep Medicaid fraud down to an absolute minimum.

To address the problem for long-term of vastly reduced fraud and commensurate reduced fraud recovery funds, States need only to reallocate existing spending. They most assuredly do not need more money blindly and blithely tossed over the transom at the problem.

The Nub of the Matter

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An article concerning the nature of “sex work” and the debate over whether it ought be decriminalized and destigmatized, there was this characterization:

On [one] side are those arguing for total decriminalization, which lifts all laws regulating the buying and selling of sex acts.

And this, from a woman who ultimately escaped from the environment:

Prostitution is someone using their money and power to get someone else to provide a service for them. You’re literally paid to be a product that is used and discarded.

There it is, in all its glory, from the life of an individual once in the environment and from the broad movement looking to decriminalize “sex” work. It isn’t about sex; it’s about faceless male gratification, for whom the woman isn’t even a human being; she’s just a body temperature, organic inflatable sex doll. It’s not even a matter of buying a selling sex; it’s only renting a warm doll for a hour or a night, otherwise akin to renting a power tool.

Say, though, that in an amoral yet otherwise ideal world, this work is entirely legalized. On what basis would we believe the women involved really are engaging in it on their own initiative and entirely free of coercion? Pimps will still be there, now legalized as agents or brokers for the firms renting these commodities. And they’ll still control the women, who they engage with, what they’ll do—be required to do under the terms of their employment—during those engagements.

Would a woman be free to leave one…employer…for another whenever she chose to do so? Would she be free to leave the…industry…altogether and seek employment doing other things wholly apart from being a rented sex doll? Those answers seem obvious.

Tellingly, too, the movement wholly ignores the men who are trafficked or pimped out as male prostitutes, and worse, the movement wholly ignores the children, of both sexes, who are trafficked for sex.

The answer to “sex work” isn’t to legalize it. It’s a multipart question: help the women (and the men and children) recover from the damage done by their present strait and then learn other means of earning a living—a legitimate living and one in which they keep all of their wages. In parallel, hammer severely the traffickers and pimps making these victims—and that’s what the women (and men and children) are to five nines significance—”available.” Hold criminally liable the customers of these pimps and traffickers for receiving illegal goods. They’re certainly not customers of the women; they’re receivers of the pimps’ and traffickers’ product. And publicly shame those customers for their abuse of the women whose bodies are the product they rented.