Can government keep up?
Ezra Klein's Wonkbook
Welcome to Wonkbook, Ezra Klein and Evan Soltas’s morning policy news primer. Send comments, criticism, or ideas to Wonkbook at Gmail dot com. To read more by Ezra and his team, go to Wonkblog.
Wonkbook dashboard
RCP Obama vs. Romney: Obama +1.4%; 7-day change: Obama -2.6%.
RCP Obama approval: 49.1%; 7-day change: -0.8%.
Intrade percent chance of Obama win: 64.1%; 7-day change: -10.7%.
Wonkbook’s number of the day: 3%. That’s the bounce Nate Silver thinks Mitt Romney got from the debate, at least judging by the earliest tracking polls. We’ll know more as the major polls with post-debate samples begin filtering out this week, and then even more when they begin coming out next week and we can see whether Romney’s bump persists or melts away.
Top story: Can policy keep up with the rapid changes in the private sector?
How changing markets and high-frequency trading is forcing the SEC to play catch-up. ”As billions of shares course through the stock market each day, investors rely on the government to keep up with Wall Street's rapid-fire traders. But in an acknowledgment that the Securities and Exchange Commission has fallen behind the firms it regulates, the agency is turning to one of those high-frequency traders for help…The program, called ‘Midas’ by the S.E.C., is part of a broader effort at the agency to monitor the proliferation of new technologies and to crack down on practices that have given sophisticated traders an advantage over ordinary investors…The S.E.C.'s rudimentary technology has hobbled its ability to untangle these events and police the automated trading firms…The system, akin to an X-ray machine for the stock market, could enable regulators to detect whether trading firms are overwhelming the market's plumbing when they rapidly submit and cancel orders.” Nathaniel Popper and Ben Protess in The New York Times.
@ReformedBroker: Problem is, if the NYSE got rid of HFT, that’s 80% of their biz! Should they back muffins and sell to traders instead?
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