These many cases of insider trading and market manipulation should force the question of KYC (“know your customer” checks) into the open. And, behind it, put on the table a debate that will remind everyone there are irreconcilable ideological convictions at stake.

Because no, there is no happy medium.
And no, neutrality does not exist.

Neutrality does not exist for a newspaper, where every article has an angle and contains the information the journalist chose to put in, and leaves out the information they chose to leave out.

Nor does neutrality exist for a government, even when it gets labelled “technocratic”, “civil society” or, less convincingly still, “military” (and even less so in the middle of a political crisis), because it has to make choices that rule out others.

Granted, the left-right divide as we knew it no longer really exists. Not because ideological borders have become porous and nuanced, but because we should instead be using a libertarian/conservative grid on economic and social issues.

Then we would see that France Insoumise (the hard left) and the Rassemblement National (the far right) are economically close and socially opposed. And that the Rassemblement National and Reconquête (Éric Zemmour’s party, further right still) are socially close but economically opposed.

That is fine.
But it urgently calls for a different way of reading things.

And the debate is the same on financial regulation.

Two issues ago (in French), I explained at length how traditional finance, notably by privatising money and financialising anything and everything, was destroying the very spirit of Bitcoin and the blockchain.

This shift comes with extremely powerful lobbying by the crypto world, backed (and funded) on the quiet by several banking lobbies, to allow on the blockchain what is not (or no longer) allowed in traditional finance.

But let us not forget history.

• The privatisation of money showed its serious flaws during the era of wildcat banking (in French);
• KYC was made mandatory under Nixon in the 1970s to curb money laundering, and has been tightened every decade since, with the famous “CFT”¹⁰ bolted on in the 2010s behind “AML”¹¹;
• Capital requirements and the other ratios imposed on financial firms arrived after each major crisis, and notably after the subprime crisis...
• Of which we now know that hyper-financialisation, leaving players unable to understand the products they dealt in, was one of the main causes.

So yes, regulation is restrictive.
It is sometimes too complex and badly designed.
But it does not come out of nowhere.

All the more so because, every single time, it is retail investors who end up paying, whether through fund managers’ losses that get passed on as fees while their middlemen still get paid, or by serving as liquidity for the big fish. In fact, I think it is a fairly safe bet (for once) that the next scandal, with losses running into tens of billions, will revolve around private equity, which is currently being democratised in every direction, though rarely the right one.

There is no shortage of examples.
Nobody can claim they did not know.

It is high time to stop whinging about regulation out of self-interest, and to remember that savings, and finance more broadly, must serve the people who invest.

That is what must guide our choices.