Securities Law Commons^™

Fintech And The Innovation Trilemma, Yesha Yadav, Chris Brummer

Vanderbilt Law School Faculty Publications

Whether in response to roboadvising, artificial intelligence, or crypto-currencies like Bitcoin, regulators around the world have made it a top policy priority to supervise the exponential growth of financial technology (or "fintech") in the post-Crisis era. However, applying traditional regulatory strategies to new technological ecosystems has proven conceptually difficult. Part of the challenge lies in the tradeoffs involved in regulating innovations that could conceivably both help and hurt consumers and market participants alike. Problems also arise from the common assumption that today's fintech is a mere continuation of the story of innovation that has shaped finance for centuries.

This Article …

Revolving Elites: The Unexplored Risk Of Capturing The Sec, Randall S. Thomas

Vanderbilt Law School Faculty Publications

Fears have abounded for years that the sweet spot for capture of regulatory agencies is the “revolving door” whereby civil servants migrate from their roles as regulators to private industry. Recent scholarship on this topic has examined whether America’s watchdog for securities markets, the Securities and Exchange Commission (“SEC”), is hobbled by the long-standing practices of its enforcement staff exiting their jobs at the Commission and migrating to lucrative private sector employment where they represent those they once regulated. The research to date has been inconclusive whether staff revolving door practices have weakened the SEC’s verve. In this paper, we …

Oversight Failure In Securities Markets, Yesha Yadav

Vanderbilt Law School Faculty Publications

According to statute, securities exchanges play an essential role in ensuring compliance with applicable laws and industry standards. Long imagined as unique in their institutional capacity to bring traders together, collect information and exclude problem participants from the marketplace, exchanges have offered an efficient source of private discipline for public regulators. The classic conception of the exchange, however, no longer holds true in today’s markets. Rather than concentrate activity within a handful of exchanges, equity markets are fragmented across a network of 14 exchanges and around 40 lightly regulated, off-exchange alternative venues (colloquially, “dark pools”).

This Article shows that the …

Calculating Sec Whistleblower Awards: A Theoretical Approach, Amanda M. Rose

Vanderbilt Law School Faculty Publications

The Dodd-Frank Act provides that SEC whistleblower awards must equal not less than 10 and not more than 30 percent of the monetary penalties collected in the action to which they relate; SEC Rule 21F-6 provides criteria that the SEC may consider in determining the award percentage within the statutory bounds. When applying the Rule 21F-6 criteria, the SEC is required to think only in percentage terms, ignoring the dollar payout the award will actually yield. Last June the SEC proposed to change this, at least in cases where the existing methodology would yield an award less than $2 million …