Securities Law Legislations
Securities law has been regulated quite a bit with the Sarbanes-Oxley Act. This includes the underlying acts of the 1933 and 1934 older acts and FINRA. Then we can’t forget about the state Blue Sky Laws that govern securities regulation.
So there are plenty of laws on the book. The shortcoming has been enforcement of those laws, or the ability to enforce those laws. A large part of that is due to the lack of resources with respect to the SEC or the state agencies. Another problem is securities violations often don’t go to a courtroom. They don’t get adjudicated because there are not enough resources to address violations.
Securities Law Violations
You hear about public violations of Sarbanes-Oxley. There are public matters that are important and quintessential toward building public trust. But you don’t hear about private offering fraud, and there’s a lot of that out there. Keep in mind, I’m often on the defense of those actions, so I don’t say that out of hand. Those allegations are serious. But there’s a lot of them out there that don’t get to see a courtroom or aren’t adjudicated enough.
Here’s an example. There’s a FINRA arbitration proceeding. Or it could be an SEC proceeding because there’s a lack of resources. There’s not enough in the ability to prosecute the current laws on the books. That’s far from me saying that the laws on the books are more than enough. It’s not that they are over-regulatory in certain instances. But real the shortcoming is the ability to enforce those laws.
The Current Securities Market
Securities markets are very well regulated. The securities laws give regulators the ability to police and track compliance. This is whether they are at the federal level at the SEC or the state level regulators. So there’s yet to be the need for a new commission at this point and time. Everyone’s watching the economy to see where the economy’s gonna go. If we’ll have a 2008 again, for example, and a meltdown. Quite a bit ensued from that meltdown, we had Sarbanes-Oxley. We had a bunch of reforms in our securities and our banking system as a whole. We don’t want to stifle growth or innovation. But we do want to encourage is more enforcement actions of actual, proven violations of law.
The 2008 crash was an interesting phenomenon. And there were many contributing factors in my view. There were shortcomings on regulations of banks and securities in general. Alongside that, there was some recklessness on the part of institutions. To be frank, there was some recklessness on the part of the borrowers. It was a perfect storm of catastrophic events, which led to a meltdown. So in my view, regulation is great. We have enough regulation on the books as of now.
Improving Securities Law
What we need most is to better police and enforce proven breaches of violations of law. This is also needed on the consumer level. By consumer I mean even includes a business owner for example. We have to be more responsible and more efficient with the resources we have. We need to ensure that we don’t overextend ourselves or there’s not over-leveraging. Banks now have a different appreciation and understanding of the leveraging process. They have a different understanding and appreciation for the underwriting process. It’s different in how they do their job the way they should be doing it.
