The Shadow Financial Regulatory Committee (SFRC) is a group of publicly recognized independent experts on the financial services industry--including banking, insurance and securities--who meet regularly to study and critique regulatory policies affecting this sector of the economy.

The authoraddresses whether the Securities and Exchange Commission should permit the electronic order-matching markets to compete with the New York Stock Exchange.

TheSEC's proposed Regulation NMS (National Market System) serves no purpose and certainly does not amount to desirable market structure reform.

The central question in securities-market structure is whether investors are better served by human-mediated markets, such as the specialist system of the New York Stock Exchange, or by electronic markets, such as NASDAQ and the Electronic Communication Networks. The Securities and Exchange Commission's recent Regulation NMS, although it purports to...

Regulation NMS may be a way of compromising differences among contending groups, but it is not good regulatory policy and it is certainly not real market structure reform.

In less than twenty-five years, government “affordable housing” and other housing policies have turned a healthy market into a financial ruin. Until Fannie and Freddie’s market dominance and the government’s role in the housing finance system are substantially reduced or eliminated, the United States will continue to have an inferior and unstable housing market.

The latest draft of Regulation NMS, the Securities and Exchange Commission’s proposal for market structure reform, is now out for comment, and the commission has promised action soon after the comment period closes. The regulation, by extending the so-called trade-through rule to Nasdaq and covering all orders that are accessible...

Longstanding policies that were intended to promote confidence in the independence of regulatory decision-making have now been wiped away by the Dodd-Frank act, which has in effect placed all the financial regulators under the direction of the Treasury secretary.