Balancing 'Epic' Deregulation with Financial Stability

Trump and Musk’s ‘Epic’ Deregulation Must Preserve Financial Stability

Finally, regulation that defies common sense breeds cynicism. As one example among many, the Securities and Exchange Commission routinely extracts fines from financial companies for allowing their employees to converse on nonofficial channels, a practice that is all but unavoidable in the mobile communications era. A focus on changing incentives — so regulators are not rewarded for merely punishing businesses or churning out ever more rules — might help reduce such burdens. Again, though: Proceed with caution.

Bankman-Fried lieutenant builds fraud detection tool for prosecutors

The former FTX executive who wrote computer code that enabled his imprisoned former boss Sam Bankman-Fried to steal billions of dollars from cryptocurrency customers has built software to help the U.S. government uncover fraud in the stock market.

Federal prosecutors made the disclosure in a Wednesday court filing seeking leniency for Gary Wang, FTX’s former chief technology officer, at his scheduled Nov. 20 sentencing before U.S. District Judge Lewis Kaplan in Manhattan.

Coinbase Launches S&P 500 for Crypto: the COIN50 Index

Major crypto exchange Coinbase has unveiled the Coinbase 50 Index (COIN50), a benchmark representing the top 50 digital assets listed on the exchange.

These coins, per the announcement, must meet key criteria to qualify for inclusion in the benchmark. The fundamental criteria include token economics, blockchain architecture, and security.

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Head of institutional products at Coinbase Greg Tusar told Fortune the exchange is trying to “establish a benchmark that is not specific to any asset, that’s trying to give what is the broad basket of crypto assets doing, the same way that you gauge the performance of the equity markets through the S&P 500.”

Everything is securities fraud

Just think about it! You are an enterprising lawyer, you watch television news, you see a story that is like “Chipotle doesn’t put enough meat in burritos,” and you would like to turn that news item into several million dollars for yourself. How do you do it?

The obvious victims of Chipotle’s actions here are the customers who pay $11.50 for a burrito with an ample scoop of meat but get only a skimpy scoop of meat. There are, perhaps, tens of millions of these people. What are their damages? What sort of compensation can they sue for?…

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I don’t know, I am tired and embarrassed just typing this. But the other, more convenient victims here are Chipotle’s shareholders. Here’s the actual complaint in this case; it’s 20 pages and extremely straightforward. It quotes a bunch of official Chipotle statements saying “the portions aren’t getting smaller,” it quotes a bunch of social media posts saying “actually they are,” and then there’s a section titled “The Truth Begins to Emerge” that describes what, in securities class actions, is called the “corrective disclosure.” Chipotle did an earnings call saying that it expected its cost of sales to increase in the next quarter as “an investment we are making as we focus on outlier restaurants to ensure correct and generous portions,” which is (arguably) an admission that in fact it was skimping on portions. And then the stock fell.