Dear friend,
I was honored this month to join Nobel Prize-winning economist and former New York Times columnist Paul Krugman for a stimulating conversation discussing the economy, financial system, and how actions in Washington impact everyone. If you get a chance to watch it, let me know what you think:
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Washington usually begins to slow down in July. Not this year, not for us—and unfortunately not for Trump’s de-regulators who continue to act against the interests of investors, markets, capital formation, jobs, small businesses, community banks, and the economy. That’s who and what we fight for, and recently that has meant fighting the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) (or, as we now call it, the Shareholder Exploitation Commission), which is proposing to take away key information from investors and keep them in the dark for six months at a time. We at Better Markets led the charge to let investors know about this dumb and dangerous change and urged them to file comments with the SEC expressing their views.
Remarkably, more than 200,000 people—almost all individual investors—flooded the SEC with comments, with more than 99% opposing the plan to end quarterly reporting. This was the largest response to any rulemaking in the SEC’s history—by far!
Investors and markets have relied on high-quality, accurate information from public companies every quarter for more than 50 years. That is especially true for individual investors, as many expressed in their comment letters. In one letter from the Little Warrior Foundation, a childhood cancer nonprofit that relies on that information to invest its limited resources, they noted that without reading and taking action based on quarterly reports, their organization “would have misplaced donations, and wasted time that kids with cancer don’t have.” The SEC clearly doesn’t know better than 200,000+ individual investors.
The deregulators didn’t stop there—and neither did we! Better Markets joined with 14 other organizations in filing a comment letter with the Commodity Futures Trading Commission (CFTC) opposing its mindless proposal to allow betting on elections, which would incentivize election interference. We also sounded the alarm on stablecoin risks in the credit union system: the government should be supporting economic growth, not speculative, predatory actions that make financial crashes more likely. And when the CFTC directed Kalshi—a de facto online casino—to defy a federal court order, we called them out, publicly and on the record.
One last update from me: over on our Substack channel, we’re posting weekly deep dives with series focused on the latest news on AI (Tuesdays) and bank capital (Thursdays). Be sure to subscribe so you don’t miss our analysis of some of the most important cutting-edge issues facing the country.
Summer may be a slow period for some, but we’re just heating up at Better Markets! Thank you for making our work possible.
With you in the fight,
Dennis M. Kelleher
Co-founder, President, & CEO
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With a rigged economy and broken financial system that enriches Wall Street, not Main Street, it is no wonder that the economic sentiment among young adults has cratered to a record low of 48.8, and 78% of Americans now doubt their kids' lives will be better than their own—the highest share since 1990. Our new report details how a generation weighing decisions about careers, homeownership, and starting families needs meaningful policy solutions that will restore broad-based, real economic growth for hardworking communities.
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In a bright spot, a federal court told Citadel Securities and the American Securities Association to take a hike. In a two-sentence order, the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Eleventh Circuit tossed out their bid to defund the SEC's best tool for catching financial predators, fraudsters, and crooks. The Consolidated Audit Trail (CAT) is the thing that actually lets regulators see what Wall Street is doing, and that's precisely why the industry keeps trying to kill it and why we fight like hell to stop them.
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Fed Chair Kevin Warsh must answer for three things he can't talk his way around: 1) Why he's pushing to weaken bank capital requirements after witnessing the 2008 financial crash firsthand; 2) Why he won't give a straight answer on how crypto's integration into banking threatens financial stability and monetary policy; and 3) Why he's publicly preaching price stability while quietly floating a redefinition of what "stable" even means. Chair Walsh claims he wants price stability and a smaller Fed balance sheet, all while gutting the bank capital requirements both of those things actually depend on. We're not falling for it.
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Regulators are now writing the actual rules for the misnamed GENIUS Act, the law supposedly governing stablecoins. But the rules regulators are writing right now don't actually require issuers to hold enough safe, liquid assets backing their stablecoins—or, as we call them, un-stablecoins. If a stablecoin issuer makes bad bets or runs into trouble, it could collapse fast, the same way several money market funds did in 2008 and 2020. When that happens, it's not just crypto traders who get hurt. Your bank deposits and your tax dollars could end up covering losses from a stablecoin that had nothing to do with you.
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Better Markets in the News
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Fighting for the Public Interest at the Rule Writing Agencies
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Each month, our legal team outlines some of the top cases we're keeping an eye on, the Amicus "Friend of the Court" Briefs we have filed, and why everyone with a bank account, credit card, mortgage loan, or retirement loan should be interested in those cases.
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July is always a busy month on Capitol Hill, with lawmakers trying to wrap up as much legislative business as possible before leaving for the August recess. This month includes the first semi-annual report from the new Fed Chair to Congress, oversight testimony from the Acting Director of the CFPB and debate over the future of sports gambling via event contracts.
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