The Wall Street Journal recently reported that Kik, a messaging app that raised close to $100 million dollars in a 2017 initial coin offering (ICO) of its “Kin” token, is challenging a proposed Securities and Exchange Commission enforcement action against the company. As has been discussed by…
Should cryptocurrencies be regulated like securities? Financial regulators have been pondering this question for some time. In a Briefing Paper published today by the Cato Institute’s Center for Monetary and Financial Alternatives, I suggest that securities regulation would only seem warranted in certain clearly circumscribed cases. For…
Last month, the House Financial Services Committee voted to overturn 2014 SEC regulations requiring larger Money Market Funds to mark their shares to Net Asset Value (NAV) on a daily basis, rather than “penny rounding,” i.e. rounding their share values to the nearest cent on the dollar.[1]…
You may recall from my last Alt-M post that in September 2008 the failure of Lehman Brothers caused sizable losses to a large money-market mutual fund, The Reserve Primary Fund, which held hundreds of millions in Lehman IOUs. These losses reduced the fund’s asset portfolio value below…
There’s big news in the crowdfunding world. The Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) announced that they are (finally) voting on final rules Friday that would make investment crowdfunding legal. Other types of crowdfunding — funding a venture with small amounts of money solicited from a large group of…