This is the Cato Daily Podcast for Tuesday, March 5, 2024.

I'm Caleb Brown.

Imagine a database that contains a trail of every trade you make as an investor,

attached to your name, and other sensitive personal data.

Now imagine a federal agency is able to peruse that data on little more than a whim.

It's not the CIA or the NSA, it's the Securities and Exchange Commission

and the potential for abuse is hard to overstate. How they get full access to all

of your investing decisions without a warrant is appropriately a matter of

current controversy. Cato's Jennifer Schullp and Brent Scorrup comment.

When the government wants information about you as they try to understand some crime that has occurred, the government

typically has to get a warrant to compel the release of that information.

For regulatory agencies, both at the state and federal level,

often those kinds of requirements aren't really there,

because we usually think about warrants in terms of the police.

So with respect to the Securities and Exchange Commission, wanting to know about transactions for the purposes of finding or rooting out malfeasance that may have

been alleged, what have they done?

The Securities and Exchange Commission has put into place what is known as the

consolidated audit trail, known as Cat for short. I know we say a lot of jokes about putting the

cat back into the bag on this one because it's a really bad idea.

The Consolidated Audit Trail tracks all securities transactions in the country.

Every order, every trade, every trade cancellation, and makes

that information along with information about the person who made the trade, their name, their birth year, their address, available to the

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