Next they look upstairs. While the passengers are still standing beside the carousel asking what happened to their bags, the airport establishment is already discussing a brand new "Airport of the Future". New technology. New market structure. Tokenization. 24/7 trading. Digital assets. Crypto. Faster settlement. All important conversations. But there is something almost absurd about designing the new system of tomorrow while tens of thousands of passengers are still asking what happened to their luggage from the last flight. That is the part I cannot get past. Downstairs: “Where are our bags?” Upstairs: “Welcome to our symposium on the future of luggage” Let me make it real for you and look at what "upstairs" looks like: The 2026 Financial Markets Quality (FMQ) Conference is being held today, Wednesday, September 23, 2026, from 8:00 a.m. to 5:00 p.m. EDT at @Georgetown University’s Lohrfink Auditorium in the Rafik B. Hariri Building. It is hosted by Georgetown’s Psaros Center for Financial Markets and Policy: finpolicy.georgetown.edu/fin… This year’s theme is “Innovation and Integrity in Financial Markets”, the program centers on how technology, policy, and market design are reshaping finance, especially prediction markets, tokenization, private markets, trading infrastructure, and digital-asset regulation... how interesting, right?! Agenda Highlights: -Prediction Markets and the New Economics of Information (Rostin Behnam, Amanda Fischer, Brian Quintenz; moderated by Guy Adami). -Conversation with Terry Duffy, CME Group CEO (Moderated by former House Financial Services Chair Patrick McHenry) -Conversation with Sen. Bill Hagerty (Moderated by POLITICO’s Victoria Guida) -Digital-assets policy conversation (Tyler Williams and Patrick Witt) -Growth and Evolution of Private Markets (Leaders from Edward Jones, Churchill Asset Management, Lincoln International, and Kirkland & Ellis) -Conversation with SEC Commissioner Mark Uyeda (Moderated by World Federation of Exchanges CEO Nandini Sukumar) -Conversation with Tradeweb CEO Billy Hult (Moderated by former NYSE President Stacey Cunningham) -Conversation with NEC Director Kevin Hassett (Moderated by Psaros Center Executive Director Michael Piwowar) -Market Infrastructure in the Age of Technological Innovation (Broadridge, Nasdaq Private Market, Optiver, and former CFTC Chair Tim Massad) -Tokenized Finance: Innovation, Liquidity, and Market Integrity (BlackRock’s Samara Cohen, Bullish CEO Tom Farley, and DTCC CEO Frank La Salla) -Global Economy in Transition (JPMorgan Asset & Wealth Management CEO Mary Callahan Erdoes and IMF First Deputy Managing Director Dan Katz) Why It Matters: The agenda brings together senior regulators, policymakers, exchange operators, asset managers, market-infrastructure firms, and digital-finance leaders. That makes it particularly relevant for anyone tracking: -U.S. and international market-structure policy -The regulatory direction for prediction markets and digital assets -Tokenization’s effects on liquidity, settlement, and investor protections -Private-credit and private-market valuation, transparency, and access -The intersection of macroeconomic policy and capital markets. You couldn’t write it. And this is not an argument against innovation. Quite the opposite. If markets are going to become faster, more automated, more global and increasingly tokenized, then reconciliation and market integrity become MORE important, not less. You cannot build tomorrow’s airport on top of yesterday’s unreconciled luggage. Before we add more terminals… more runways… more automation… more digital assets… and markets that never close… perhaps somebody should make sure the manifest balances...? Because innovation without reconciliation does not remove risk. It scales it. And if #MMTLP exposed anything worth understanding, it is that the future of market structure cannot just be about SPEED. It has to be about whether the record can actually be TRUSTED. The passengers are still waiting. The luggage is still the question. And perhaps before everyone redesigns the airport… somebody should finally check the basement and those dark corridors?

They need to have their FINRA license revoked. this is not their 1st, 2nd or 3rd strike...

Now lets bring the timeline to December 2022. At MIA, the MMTLP flight is already on the board. The destination is clear: NEXT BRIDGE Passengers are checked in. The gate is assigned. Everyone is watching the departure board. Then the airport announces the time and date is all set and the flight is cleared for take of.... suddenly the airport send out a second announcement... that an “extraordinary event” has occurred. THE RUNWAY CLOSES! U3 HALT. And suddenly the passengers, the airline AND the pilots are all standing in the terminal asking a very simple question: “Hang on… where did the plane go?” That is where the analogy stops being funny... Because when the flight does not leave as expected, the passengers do what passengers always do: They ask the airline and they ask the airport. So the airport explains the procedures. Then come the FAQs. More FAQs. Settlement explanations. Coding explanations. Rule explanations. Technical explanations. All very detailed. All very procedural. But the passengers are still standing there asking the same basic question: Where is my luggage? And this is the part people outside #MMTLP need to understand. For the people affected, including the airline itself, this was never just a technical market-structure debate. It was their money. Their airline. Their positions. Their records. Their ability to operate. Their ability to reconcile what they owned with what the system said existed. That is why “just read the FAQ” was never going to settle it. An FAQ can explain a procedure. It cannot reconcile the underlying ledger after the fact. And when the passengers and the airline keeps asking questions long enough, the airport eventually faces another problem: People start asking not just what happened at the gate… …but what was happening behind the walls.