Congressional testimony prepared for the U.S. House of Representatives Financial Services Committee Hearing on Examining Private Market Exemptions as a Barrier to IPOs and Retail Investment, held on September 11, 2019.

Professor Lo discusses proposed legislation intended to allow innovative companies to gain greater access to investors who are comfortable with the higher risks (and rewards) of private investments. He highlights the "Rare Disease Fund Act" sponsored by Representatives Juan Vargas (CA-51) and Scott Peters (CA-52), which proposes the development of a "megafund"—created under the full supervision of the SEC—to acquire the development rights to multiple rare disease therapeutic candidates. Such a public-private fund focused on rare diseases could serve as a viable pilot project for further development of the megafund concept. Professor Lo remarks, "With more innovative financial and business structures, and the already existing close partnership between orphan drug developers and government agencies like the National Center for Advancing Translational Sciences, we can make even greater progress in easing the burden of disease for millions of Americans."

This document is the written testimony submitted to the US House of Representatives Financial Services Committee for its hearing on systemic risk regulation, held October 29, 2009, and it is not a formal academic research paper, but is intended for a broader audience of policymakers and regulators. Academic readers may be alarmed by the lack of comprehensive citations and literature review, the imprecise and qualitative nature of certain arguments, and the abundance of illustrative examples, analogies, and metaphors. Accordingly, such readers are hereby forewarned—this paper is not research, but is instead a summary of the policy implications that I have drawn from my interpretation of that research. This testimony focuses on three themes: (1) Establishing the means to measure and monitor systemic risk on an ongoing basis is the single-highest priority for financial regulation reform; (2) Systemic risk measurement and regulation will likely require new legislation compelling systemically important entities to provide more transparency on a confidential basis to regulators, e.g., information regarding their assets, liabilities, holdings, leverage, collateral, liquidity, counterparties, and aggregate exposures to key financial variables and other risks; and (3) Because systemic risk cuts across multiple regulatory bodies that do not necessarily share the same objectives and constraints, it may be more efficient to create an independent agency patterned after the National Transportation Safety Board (NTSB), solely devoted to measuring, tracking, and investigating systemic risk events in support of—not in competition with—all regulatory agencies.

This document is the revised written testimony titled "Hedge Funds, Systemic Risk, and the Financial Crisis of 2007–2008" submitted to the US House of Representatives Oversight Committee for its hearing on hedge funds and the financial market, held November 13, 2008, and is not a formal academic research paper, but is intended for a broader audience of policymakers and regulators. Academic readers may be alarmed by the lack of comprehensive citations and literature review, the imprecise and qualitative nature of certain arguments, and the abundance of illustrative examples, analogies, and metaphors. Accordingly, such readers are hereby forewarned—this paper is not research but is instead a summary of the policy implications that I have drawn from my interpretation of that research.

I begin with a proposal to measure systemic risk and argue that this is the natural starting point for regulatory reform since it is impossible to manage something that cannot be measured. Then I review the relation between systemic risk and hedge funds, and show that early warning signs of the current crisis did exist in the hedge-fund industry as far back as 2004. However, I argue that financial crises may be an unavoidable aspect of human behavior, and the best we can do is acknowledge this tendency and be properly prepared. This behavioral pattern, as well as traditional economic motives for regulation—public goods, externalities, and incomplete markets—are relevant for systemic risk or its converse, 'systemic safety', and I suggest applying these concepts to the functions of the financial system to yield a rational process for regulatory reform. Also, I propose the formation of a new investigative office patterned after the National Transportation Safety Board (NTSB) to provide the kind of information aggregation and transparency that is called for in the previous sections. Another aspect of transparency involves fair-value accounting, and I review some of the recent arguments for its suspension and propose developing a new branch of accounting focusing exclusively on risk. I conclude with a discussion of the role of financial technology and education in the current crisis, and argue that more finance training is needed, not less.