Comment Text:
Dear CFTC:
Confidence: It’s not just important that retail investors have faith in capital markets, it’s essential for markets to function. How does one reinforce confidence – as suspicion mounts that regulators aren’t regulating, that there are preferred participants in “free and fair” markets? That somehow, those employed to protect individual investors have chosen a side in opposition to them and their interests?
The solutions aren’t complicated or difficult, but no one wants to undertake these steps because they are unpopular with a very powerful status quo: The needs of a well-connected few outweighing the many.
Increased transparency throughout a transaction – on all sides.
Rigorous reinforcement of regulations for any agency, organization or firm that touches retail trades.
(These organizations have been entrusted with safeguarding the financial futures and fortunes of the American people. What is there to hide? And why would they desire or require an imbalance on the financial playing field? Why would the “Smart Money” need a leg up, a dark pool deal or so much leverage over the “Dumb Money” to succeed?)
The elimination of opacity that obscures practices and turns market functionality into “Black Box” transactions is not acceptable.
Once confidence is truly lost it is difficult to impossible to win it back and if one does it could take generations of indoctrination to do so: The kind of time frame synonymous with shaking off the miserly purchasing habits of Americans post the Great Depression.
