From what I have read about Section 31 the SEC does not have the authority to move the fee beyond the limit set by the law
Keep in mind The fact that a bunch of daytraders doesn't want it can make it more attractive to much of the street. The Act of 34 has very few fee caps and has been amended many many times. There is currently no permanent head of the SEC and our new sheriff and his VP have discussed numerous changes and they'll get to stack the commission. If you kill HFT the only one who is gonna object is HFT and it looks very much like they have been preparing for it - much of the street would love it. If we get Elizabeth Warren as the new head prepare for change. If you don't get Warren - Harris still has a whole agenda. and imagine getting an activist like Warren. Will they have a new commission place by March 15 - if they rush to stack the commission ask yourself why.
It's important to understand the difference between law (U.S. Code or U.S.C.) and regulation (Code of Federal Regulations of CFR). Regulation has to flow from a law and most certainly can't contradict a law. In some cases laws are written in a way that allows for a large degree of discretion for agencies writing the regulation. The sections covering Act 34 fees are not one of those laws. For example, 15 U.S.C. 78ee(b) states: "(b)Exchange-traded securities Subject to subsection (j), each national securities exchange shall pay to the Commission a fee at a rate equal to $15 per $1,000,000 of the aggregate dollar amount of sales of securities (other than bonds, debentures, other evidences of indebtedness, security futures products, and options on securities indexes (excluding a narrow-based security index)) transacted on such national securities exchange." with adjustments very specifically listed under 15 U.S.C. 78ee(j) The SEC does have the latitude to change that via regulation to anything other than the $15 per $1,000,000 adjusted by the very specific formula in 15 U.S.C. 78ee(j). They publish the adjusted rates in the CFR, but they don't have any discretion to make up that number in any way. If they went contrary to the law, the branch of government which adjudicates those matters is the judiciary, which is currently by far the most conservative of the 3 branches of government and thus the least likely to allow for excessive interpretation by regulations. The statement "The Act of 34 has very few fee caps and has been amended many many times." is, to borrow a term recently used, a walking legal contradiction. First it exactly and specifically lists the fee structure. Second, if it is "amended" then by definition both houses of congress have passed a new law and the President has signed it. Therefore amending the law isn't some backdoor use of regulation to get around passing a law to accomplish something, it is in fact passing a law to accomplish that thing. Unfortunately the differences about law and regulation are somewhat esoteric, it's not taught much if at all in school, and the small government anti-regulation folks have been purposely feeding misinformation about it to take advantage of this general lack of knowledge about it on the part of the public. The bottom line is that there isn't a way to impose a FTT absent both houses of congress passing a bill and the President signing it. Full stop. As for "if they rush to stack the commission ask yourself why."? Maybe because the democrats feel like actually staffing your government's organizations to do the jobs they're mandated to do by law is the right thing to do, rather than leaving thousands of positions open like the Trump administration did out of a combination of sheer incompetence and willful efforts to undermine the laws passed by congress and signed by the President? I'm curious how anyone could see filling an agency as legally required in order to perform the job it's been legally assigned as something nefarious?
Nefarious - your term. When hasn't the SEC been used as a political tool? If it's proposed it will go out for comment
Of course every agency is a political tool at the end of the day. Not for nothing the agencies are all part of the executive branch, that's the whole point of the plum book non-competitive positions of which there are literally thousands in government and the fact that every agency is headed by a political appointee. But they're all necessary to allow the agencies they staff to do the jobs they're statutorily tasked with. Even DoD is headed by political appointees and there are hundreds of appointees throughout the agency. Making the political appointments required indicates a competent administration doing its job, not some conspiracy to subvert the law by administratively implementing an FTT. Which I clearly showed isn't possible. I'm not sure what your "out for comment" comment meant. It is generally required that proposed administrative rulemaking go out for comment. That in no way changes the fact that an agency can't propose rules without an implementing law, comment period or no, and that there's no way for them to increase Act 34 fees beyond what the law allows for. So again, if an FTT happens it will be because congress passes a law and the president signs it. And as I indicated before, it's highly unlikely that congress won't pass that law because it's not in the Senate majority leader's interest to do so. I have a friendly $1,000 to the charity of the other's choice wager with @lindq (https://www.elitetrader.com/et/threads/ny-wants-to-try-a-ftt.347791/page-4#post-5161015) that an FTT won't pass in 2021. Would you like to engage in a similar wager that the SEC doesn't administratively pass an FTT in 2021 absent legislation?
Happy for you to point out any specific errors in what I explained. If there aren't any, then there's nothing to "watch", now is there? Buy hey, I only spent 20 years in government working with this stuff, what do I know right?
I don't quite understand this part in your post in bold. U.S stocks are only traded on U.S exchanges. How can U.S investors/traders shift their trading elsewhere if their investment targets are U.S stocks? I don't see how a FTT on U.S stocks will result in these people shifting their trading elsewhere because there's no choice to do so.
What requires U.S. stocks to be traded only on U.S. exchanges? In fact a number already are traded already on a number of other exchanges, and it's trivial for them all to dual list if the financial incentive is there.