This is the Cato Daily Podcast for Friday, January 12, 2024.

I'm Caleb Brown. The SEC's Account on X Hat.

And while it was funny and embarrassing very embarrassing it also raises a number

of important questions about the SEC's role in setting rules for private firms

the even-handed application of its rules, and its curious

demands for volumes of sensitive data from those same firms.

Cato's Jennifer Shelf explains what we should take away.

The Securities and Exchange Commission likes mandating things.

It's their job to mandate things on private parties in the interest of consumer protection,

an investor protection. But their Twitter account was hacked and they sort of it appears sheepishly admitted yeah we didn't

really have two-factor authentication on and this wasn't without consequence right? No it wasn't without consequence, right?

No, it wasn't without consequence.

So what happened, or at least what we know happened,

was the SEC's Twitter account posted a piece of information saying that Bitcoin EDFs had been approved.

Looked pretty official.

Had a little nice shiny photo of Gary Gensler with a quote from him talking about the

approval and upon the news of that the Bitcoin price rose.

About 20 minutes later, the SEC on the same Twitter account announced that the

account had been compromised and in fact Bitcoin EDFs had not been approved and not surprisingly the price of

Bitcoin then fell. This type of if a news from a regulator is expected to move markets, so it's not a surprise that it did.

It just turned out that the news was not true based on, I would say, someone, as we know it now, getting a hold of the SEC's Twitter account.

So this raises a lot of different issues all at once.

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