8th November 2023 > > The SEC & Robinhood.

tl;dr

Gary Gensler and his pay cut is a model that can be applied elsewhere. Robinhood launches crypto trading in the EU, but not in the UK.

Market Snap

Market Wrap

A recent survey of financial advisors in the US by the Digital Asset Council of Financial Professionals reveals that just 12% recommend BTC to their clients. When asked what they plan to do when a spot BTC ETF is approved, a whopping 77% say they will recommend BTC to their clients.

Curious Cryptos’ Commentary – SEC

The Financial Services and General Government bill – affectionately known as FSGG and running to 291 pages – is a forlorn and hopeless attempt at reining in US government spending:

https://www.congress.gov/118/crpt/hrpt145/CRPT-118hrpt145.pdf

An amendment has been proposed that restricts the salary of SEC Chair Gary Gensler to just $1 a year:

This is a great idea.

Here in the UK, we can start with the plethora of diversity officers inhabiting all publicly funded organisations, especially the NHS. Don’t get me wrong. NHS diversity officers undoubtedly achieve their primary objective of diversifying taxpayers’ funds away from patient care, but I remain attached to the quaint and old-fashioned idea that the NHS is there to make its patients’ lives better, not just its employees.

Another application of this concept is that anyone who earns a living from the state, but has outside interests, suffers a pound-for-pound reduction in their taxpayer funded income for every pound of private income, given that the latter is largely driven by the former.

That would remove at a stroke the huge cost of paying for MPs, let alone the Lords, who somehow retain a £300 per day “expenses” claim that is both tax-free and requires no receipts. An old socialist firebrand, who shall remain nameless, sits in my Mum’s local pub from midday onwards after making the relatively short trip to the House of Lords and back again with £300 in his pocket for just clocking in. That’s nice work if you can get it.

Curious Cryptos’ Commentary – Robinhood

Robinhood, the popular trading app that drove the GameStop frenzy a couple of years ago, reported Q3 results yesterday:

https://s28.q4cdn.com/948876185/files/doc_news/Robinhood-Reports-Third-Quarter-2023-Results-2023.pdf

Included in the results was this comment:

“As another step in global expansion, we are also planning to launch crypto trading in the EU following our UK launch”.

Note that the UK launch is a stock brokerage service and does not include cryptos, presumably because of the heightened crypto scepticism emanating from the UK regulator.

EU lawmakers are cock-a-hoop about all the extra crypto tax-dollars they are accumulating to spend on their pet projects.