SWP Climbs The Hill

I have become a regular contributor to The Hill. My inaugural column on the regulation of spoofing is here. The argument in a nutshell is that: (a) spoofing involves large numbers of cancellations, but so do legitimate market making strategies, so there is a risk that aggressive policing of spoofing will wrongly penalize market makers, thereby raising the costs of supplying liquidity; (b) the price impacts of spoofing are very, very small, and transitory; (c) enforcement authorities sometimes fail to pursue manipulations that have far larger price impacts; therefore (d) a focus on spoofing is a misdirection of scarce enforcement resources.

My contributions will focus on finance and regulatory issues. So those looking for my trenchant political commentary will have to keep coming here