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Commentary

January’s GameStop frenzy, where amateur online retail traders took what they hoped would be a rollicking joyride through the world of high finance, has left regulators scratching their heads about what to do next and the retail buccaneers themselves with quite a hangover. The newly minted SEC Chair, Gary Gensler, told the Senate Banking Committee in testimony last week that the Commission is still trying to figure out what the GameStop drama meant and what, if anything, the market regulator should do about it.

After nearly twenty years of study, the Securities and Exchange Commission seems poised to rewrite the rules on proxy disclosure for mutual funds. Two SEC commissioners predicted within days of each other that there will be radical revisions to how regulated investment companies will report their proxy voting behavior. Both Acting Chair Allison Herren Lee and Commissioner Caroline Crenshaw said in separate speeches last month that the SEC’s current proxy reporting form is not meeting the needs of investors.

Feb 1, 2021: The social controversy over Gamestop’s (GME) battle of wills — r/wallstreetbets v ‘The Shorts’ — may well harden the scrutiny of regulators and litigators toward the US$2.4 trillion global equity finance ecosystem that supports hedge fund strategies. This is a pivotal moment, not only for GME and The Shorts, but also for the clearing systems that their lenders and agents use to secure the funds’ trade settlements and financings.

Ignorance of clearing house rules, coupled with uneven disclosures had clearly inflamed social tensions over the GME short squeeze. These tensions were exacerbated when risk managers at clearing houses were portrayed in the media as fighting the popular uprising of legions of day traders.

The early torrent of media hyperbole about distributed ledger technologies (DLT), such as blockchain and shared ledgers, has now been supplanted by reflection on lessons learned. Scaling concerns were allayed to some degree by DTCC’s November 2018 report that its study of throughput capacity for DLT was sufficient to handle massive U.S. equity trading volumes.