Larry Ribstein has a typically cogent analysis of the mess at the NYSE, which concludes with a typically idealistic "solutio n":
The solution? Not, as Professor Bainbridge suggests, a simple NASDAQ-style restructuring, with a split of the trading and regulatory arms. The answer is, to put it bluntly, deregulation of the securities industry.
Which will happen about the same time pigs fly. My proposed solution is a second-best one, which is founded on the notion that politics is the art of the possible. A NASDAQ-style restructuring seems (just barely) plausible under current conditions. Deregulating the SROs and the industry is a non-starter. To the contrary, one of the various securities law newsletters (I forget which one, but I think it was BNA's) found it newsworthy that Senator Sarbanes merely implied that there would be no new securities legislation during this Congress. (In retrospect, this post reads in a more testy tone than intended, for which I apologize to Larry.)
