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Crypto Volatility Heightens with Panic-Driven Regulation
In reaction to the volatile events of the last few weeks, both the stock and cryptocurrency markets have taken a deep dive. While this downturn…
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George Washington, George Jarkesy, and the Administrative State’s Lack of Fundamental Justice
The recent ruling by the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Fifth Circuit in Jarkesy v. SEC is a victory for limited constitutional government…
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Credit Union Liberalization Bill Clears Away Never-Needed Red Tape
When I testified last July at a high-profile hearing on financial inclusion, I urged members of the House Financial Services Committee to liberalize regulations…
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CEI Joins Groups in Telling SEC to Stay Away from Private Markets
It’s bad enough that Congress and the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) have made it so costly for smaller companies to go and stay public…
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Lisa Cook’s First Amendment Problem Should Concern Senators
As early as Tuesday, the U.S. Senate could vote on the nomination of Lisa Cook to be a governor of the Federal Reserve, along with…
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My Response to the CFPB’s “Junky” Regulatory Inquiry on Fees
In response to the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau’s (CFPB) “request for information” on what its Director Rohit Chopra has labeled as “junk fees” on financial…
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Celebrate Decade of JOBS Act as Deregulatory Success
10 years ago, a GOP-controlled House, a Democrat-controlled Senate, and a Democratic president came together to lighten the regulatory burden on America’s upstart job creators.
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Why Cannabis Banking Liberalization Would Indeed Increase U.S. Competitiveness
As war continues in the aftermath of Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, interest by policy makers and the media has spiked in competitiveness bills passed separately…
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George Washington, Larry David, Cryptocurrency, and Freedom
One of the most talked-about Super Bowl ads was that of Larry David traveling through history and naysaying innovations that turned out to be hugely…
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Lisa Cook’s First Amendment Problem
Today, the Senate Banking Committee is set to vote on five nominations for the Federal Reserve Board. My CEI colleague Myron Ebell and I have…
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New Mexico Should Reject Interest Rate Limit Base on Federal Mismeasurement
There is an old saying that “a lie can travel halfway around the world while the truth is still putting on its shoes.” It has…
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CFPB’s Dodd-Frank Race and Gender Data Collection Mandates Will Harm Financial Inclusion
In mid-2020, on the 10th anniversary of the Dodd-Frank financial overhaul being rammed through Congress and signed by then-President Obama, I catalogued the damage…
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Lenny Bruce, Capitalism vs. Communism, and Biden’s Banking Nominee
At the height of the Cold War in the 1960s, then-controversial comedian Lenny Bruce offered a surprising boost to the defense of capitalism over communism.
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“Stop Wall Street Looting Act” Would Empower Wall Street, Harm Main Street
Washington policies are often misnamed. Recent legislative proposals labeled “infrastructure” concerned not roads or bridges, but social spending. But sometimes, a bill in Congress…
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Reconciliation Bill Provision Threatens IRA Holders’ Investing Opportunities
A couple of weeks back, I commented, in a Competitive Enterprise Institute blog post, on a provision of the $3.5 trillion budget reconciliation bill…
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Proposed New Restrictions Threaten Opportunity for Middle Class Investors
While President Biden and Congressional Democrats have called for reining in big firms through antitrust and other punitive policies, a tax provision contrived by Congress…
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CEI Continues Fight for Cryptocurrency Freedom
Because the Senate failed to adopt the bipartisan Wyden-Lummis-Toomey amendment even after it was watered down, the infrastructure package’s cryptocurrency tax reporting provisions could destroy,…
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Senate Should Pass the Wyden-Lummis-Toomey Cryptocurrency Amendment
The Senate must adopt the bipartisan Wyden-Lummis-Toomey amendment to ensure that the infrastructure package’s cryptocurrency tax reporting provisions do not destroy, rather than help build,…
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Wisdom on the Interest-Rate Price Control Folly from John Stuart Mill to Thomas Sowell
Today, the Senate held a hearing entitled, “Protecting Americans from Debt Traps by Extending the Military’s 36% Interest Rate Cap to Everyone.” But the…
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Federal Interest Rate Cap and Overturning of “True Lender” Rule Threaten Credit Innovation
On May 11, the U.S. Senate passed a measure, which, though sold as stopping “predatory lenders,” would greatly limit access to credit from solid lenders…
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Biden’s Carried Interest Tax Would Force All Partnerships to Carry Big Burden
“The Biden administration and its allies excel at leveraging crises to expand government,” observes my CEI colleague Wayne Crews on the Biden “infrastructure” plan.
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Don’t Fear Crypto Dip; Fear Regulations that Will Harm America’s Cryptocurrency Lead
After a massive runup for the past few months, the cryptocurrency market experienced a slight dip over the past week and a half. This dip…
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New CEI Paper Revisits Viral Exchange on Payday Loan Rates by Katie Porter and Kathy Kraninger.
It’s not every day an exchange about a technical measurement for loans goes viral on social media. During a 2019 House Committee on Financial…
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Janet Yellen vs. Suze Orman on Bitcoin and Cryptocurrency
As Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen is testifying now before the House Financial Services Committee, she will likely get questions about the popularity of bitcoin…
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Young Investor’s Tragedy Should Not Cancel Robinhood and Other Fintech Investing Apps
Since the Gamestop-Reddit frenzy, the FinTech investing app Robinhood has taken a lot of arrows. Those who decried the stock market rallies blamed Robinhood for…
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Respect, Don’t Restrict, Retail Investors
Watching the wild gyrations of the stock market this week—and some of the reactions to it—brings to mind Ronald Reagan’s observations of the bureaucratic mindset…
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Treasury, FHFA Reverse ‘Net Worth Sweep” at Fannie and Freddie
The headlines yesterday were that the Trump administration had failed to exit Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac from the government-owned conservatorship. This is true…
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President Trump Should Waive Dodd-Frank Provision Harming Vaccine and Ventilator Production and Distribution
The announcement by Pfizer that the vaccine it is developing with German firm BioNTech may be 90 percent effective against COVID-19 is worth celebrating.
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Finally, a Fix for Fannie and Freddie
In my recent blog post on the 10th anniversary of Dodd-Frank, I lamented that while “this supposed ‘financial reform’ has caused harmful and sometimes…
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Tragedy of Young Investor Shouldn’t Be Exploited to Harm Freedoms
The recent death of Alexander Kearns, the 20-year-old day trader who took his own life, has sparked a conversation about the business practices of an increasingly important…
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Dodd-Frank Still Harmful After a Decade, But Modest Deregulation Has Helped
Dodd-Frank has caused harmful and sometimes disastrous effects for consumers, investors, entrepreneurs, and Main Street financial institutions such as community banks and credit unions. The…
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CFPB’s Kraninger Should Drop Navient Litigation in Light of Supreme Court Holding
CEI has praised Kathy Kraninger, director of the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, for her many deregulatory initiatives that—in contrast to her predecessor, Richard Cordray—protect consumer…
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George Washington’s Fight (and Ours) against Regulation without Representation
Those who have followed CEI over the years know that one of our main grievances is “Regulation Without Representation.” The phrase—an apt description of laws…
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Why George Washington Shouldn’t Be Canceled
The father of our country is making news, but for disappointing reasons. Washington was trending on Twitter after his statue was toppled in Portland. A private…
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Fedcoin and FedNow are Dangerous and Unnecessary Expansions of Federal Reserve Power
To counter the financial damage from America’s national lockdown, the Federal Reserve has taken unprecedented stepsy. Most of these moves received grudging acceptance even from…
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My Answer to J.K. Rowling on What Cryptocurrency Is
To paraphrase a famous financial services commercial from the 1970s and 1980s, when J.K. Rowling asks, people answer. When the famed author of the Harry…
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SEC’s Shuttering of Fund Fees – #NeverNeeded and Never Authorized
Over the past month, CEI and others have pointed to #NeverNeeded regulations that are hindering our response to the COVID-19 pandemic and to economic dislocation.
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Modified Libra Cryptocurrency Still an Innovation, but Clear away Regulatory Barriers for More
Libra and other cryptocurrencies could serve functions other than initially imagined. The potential for faster payments from Libra and other cryptocurrencies, at a time when…
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How SEC Accounting Regulations Hindered National Stockpile—and Still May Be Doing So
In a new report, CEI experts outline #NeverNeeded regulations that are frustrating responses to the pandemic and its aftermath. Among those is an obscure Securities…
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Don’t Save Restaurants by Shafting Consumers
Restaurants are among the hardest—if not the hardest—hit of industries impacted by the COVID-19 pandemic. Like other industries, restaurants are lobbying Congress and state legislatures…
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Best Books of 2019: Year of Vindication for Mother of George Washington
August 25 of this past year was the 230th anniversary of the death of Mary Ball Washington, the mother of the first president of the…
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Consumer Financial Protection Bureau Should End Frivolous Student Loan Lawsuit
The efforts of Consumer Financial Protection Bureau (CFPB) Director Kathy Kraninger have gone a long way in reversing egregious Obama-era actions that plagued the agency,…
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In Praise of Pro-Consumer Tenure of Finance Regulator Kraninger
As she prepares to give her semi-annual testimony to Congress this week—on Wednesday to the House Financial Services Consumer Financial Protection Bureau and on Thursday…
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Feds: Gambling Fine, But Investing Too Risky
“In the risk reform debate, as in so many political debates, logic is often for losers.” So lamented Competitive Enterprise Institute founder and president emeritus…
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Debt Collectors Keep Credit Market Flowing
Debt collecting is a profession that gets little love, but given the social good done by debt collectors who operate ethically and follow the rules,…
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Defiance of Congress Melts Federal Reserve Credibility
In advance of his testimony yesterday before the House Financial Services Committee, Federal Reserve Chairman Jerome Powell was the subject of a front-page story in The…
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Facebook Libra Highlights Flaws of Fed Foray into Real-Time Payments
More than ten years after the pseudonymous Satoshi Nakamoto published the source code for Bitcoin, and after hundreds of other cryptocurrencies have been introduced, Facebook…
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SEC’s ‘Regulation Best Interest’ Respects Investor Choice
Today, the Securities and Exchange Commission approved final rules that comprise “Regulation Best Interest,” which will govern conduct of broker-dealers in their transactions with retail investors. Any…
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Don’t Let Credit Scoring Kerfuffle Compromise GSE Reform
Just when it seemed that reforming the government-sponsored enterprises (GSEs) Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac was becoming a “third rail” that politicians did not want…
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Shed Light on Cryptocurrency ‘Dark Matter’ Regulation at SEC
A few days ago, the Trump administration issued a memorandum strongly discouraging what the Competitive Enterprise Institute’s Wayne Crews has called “regulatory dark matter.” The…