Questions of FinTech and RegTech have been paramount in my mind and, I think it is safe to say, the minds of my fellow Commissioners in recent months.[1]
Old Fields and New Corn
On the paneled walls of the
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An important and long-standing question in the economics of information is whether voluntary disclosure leads to full disclosure. A compelling and intuitive argument, often described as the “unraveling” argument (see Milgrom, 1981), suggests that the answer is, yes. In brief, …
I’ve had the honor of serving as a commissioner of the SEC for just over a month now— and I’ve learned a lot in that time, mostly from the outstanding staff. I’ve been schooled about cryptocurrency, spent hours wading through …
Questions of FinTech and RegTech have been paramount in my mind and, I think it is safe to say, the minds of my fellow Commissioners in recent months.[1]
On the paneled walls of the
Online trading platforms have become a popular way investors can buy and sell digital assets, including coins and tokens offered and sold in so-called Initial Coin Offerings (“ICOs”). The platforms often claim to give investors the ability to quickly buy
Late last year, the SEC’s Division of Corporation Finance issued a no-action letter in which it agreed that a proposal seeking to lower the threshold for calling a special meeting from 25 percent to 10 percent of the outstanding shares …
In 2011, the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) introduced a Whistleblower (WB) program as part of the Dodd-Frank Act to protect investors through greater deterrence of securities law violations and more effective enforcement. The program offers financial incentives to provide …
Professor Donald Langevoort of Georgetown Law speaks with Reynolds Holding about how two duties — the obligation to disclose or abstain from trading on material information and the duty to reveal corporate secrets — evolved from the Second Circuit’s Texas …
If all goes well with its February 28 filing with the Securities and Exchange Commission, Spotify will be the first firm to go public in the U.S. via a direct listing on a stock exchange. Simply put, this means that, …
I’m so glad to be back home here in New York. It’s an incredible honor to be speaking after Mayor Bloomberg today. And I’m sure the Mayor will be pleased to know that I plan to return and speak in
Today [February 24, 2018] is a special day for the [Securities and Exchange Commission’s] Office of the Investor Advocate.[1] I started this job four years ago today, and because I am the first Investor Advocate that is also the …
There is an extensive literature on the benefits of mandatory disclosure by firms, but measuring the costs of such disclosure has been more challenging (Leuz and Wysocki 2016). In particular, while some believe that mandatory disclosure could increase litigation against …
On February 20, the Securities and Exchange Commission approved the issuance of an interpretive release, available here, to provide guidance to public companies when preparing disclosures about cybersecurity risks and incidents. The release also communicates the Commission’s views on the
My first few weeks at the Securities and Exchange Commission have been a whirlwind—and just to be clear, I am not talking about the markets.[1] In a few short weeks, I have gotten a crash course on SEC policymaking—and
The remarkable growth and volatility of Bitcoin and other virtual currencies has raised the question of how these markets are regulated. The CFTC has emerged as “the federal overseer of digital currencies like bitcoin,” according to Bloomberg.[1] Other federal …
Sales of blockchain tokens in so-called initial coin offerings (“ICOs”)[1] exploded in 2017. According to CoinSchedule, a website that tracks ICO (or digital token sale) data, the total amount raised in ICOs in 2017 was $3,700,682,293, which compares to …
Litigation allows shareholders to seek remedies for fiduciary breaches by managers or directors, such as when there has been a misrepresentation of financial results or illegal insider trading. Twitter, for example, faces a derivative lawsuit alleging that executives provided misleading …
On January 30, 2018, the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) announced[1] that it had obtained an order from a U.S. District Court in Dallas, Texas, halting an allegedly fraudulent initial coin offering scheme. The SEC’s complaint alleges that …
Financial institutions and their regulators have long been early adopters of new information technologies (IT). In a short essay based on two posts for the Oxford Business Law Blog (available here and here), I first identify four uses of …
The number of accounting-related class action lawsuits has increased in recent decades, imposing billions of dollars of direct and indirect costs on public companies and, eventually, their shareholders each year. Although accounting theory says that litigation risk generates accounting conservatism …