“The best trader I ever knew was broken when he took over a dying friend’s book. Everyone knew the book and turned on him.” Born in 1899, Henry Goldberg was the oldest trader on the floor of the New York Stock Exchange when I interviewed him in 1985. He answered my questions about trading expertise during a NYSE-sanctioned survey to find possible use cases for artificial intelligence. 

The European Commission has reached agreement with legislators and financial trade groups on a digitized infrastructure to reshape the EU and, by extension, the global securities markets. The resolution affects all transactions involving EU securities, including securities loans, by (1) green-lighting the Distributed Ledger Pilot Regime, an effort to foster fintech innovation in the EU, and (2) delaying mandatory buy-ins, a highly contentious aspect of the ongoing sweeping reforms to the EU's securities settlement system. 

The SEC has proposed a radical and potentially very costly reporting regime for securities finance transactions to increase transparency "to brokers, dealers, and investors."  While there is no requirement for the Commission to discuss or examine the economic effects of regulatory alternatives, in this case, they have included some alternatives it could consider to the reporting structure they propose, presumably to focus potential commenters on specific ideas they want explored. The Commission has seemingly outsourced the economic analysis of its suggested alternatives to industry commenters. Also, by doing so, the Commission has hinted it is interested in hearing about well-supported alternatives, and may even be inviting counter-proposals.