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?

So, welcome to MIA: Market Integrity Airport. Ethical issuers are the airlines. They are trying to run a legitimate business, follow their flight plan, keep the aircraft safe, and get everyone to the destination. Retail investors and company employees are the passengers. They bought a ticket. They went through security. They followed the rules. And they reasonably assumed somebody had checked whether the airport itself was... SAFE. Simple enough? But then... there are the professional operators who seem to know EVERY service corridor in the building. They know which doors open. They know which contractors to call. They know where the cameras point. They know the brokers... The lawyers. The market makers. The research shops. The media contacts. The counterparties. The lawmakers. The other "frequent flyers" who have been using the terminal for decades. In this analogy, the "Ansons" of the world are not the bloke trying to sneak a bottle through airport security. They are ALREADY inside. Comfortably seated at the airport VIP LOUNGE. And they appear remarkably familiar with exactly how the luggage system works. That does not prove wrongdoing. But it does raise a rather obvious question: WHO knows HOW the airport ACTUALLY works? And who ONLY knows what is PRINTED on the boarding pass? Because for ordinary passengers, employees and ethical airlines, the rules are visible. The interesting part is what happens in the dark corridors no one sees... or has access to. And apparently, for a very long time, no one thought to look downstairs or ask for a quick tour.

Now let’s check the basement... Because the really interesting part of any airport operation is NOT the VIP departure lounge. It is the infrastructure passengers never see. -The service corridors. -The baggage tunnels. -The access rooms. -The logistical machine. -The contractors. -The handlers. -The control systems. The people who know which keycard opens which room. The people who know exactly where the cameras point. And the people who have been moving through those corridors for years. In our MIA airport analogy, this is where the sophisticated operators sit. Not literally, obviously... But this is where the relationships live. -Prime brokers. -Market makers. -Research shops. -Media relationships. -Counterparties. -Consultants. -Lawyers. -Trading desks. -Distribution networks. And yes, the people helping shape the narrative outside the terminal too. They are not obscuring their faces with balaclavas. They have Bloomberg terminals. -Compliance departments. -Law firms. -Research notes. -Invoices. -Cross-border relationships... ...and very nice suits. Think less Goodfellas... with baseball bats. More Goodfellas with... compliance departments. That line is a joke but the questions underneath it are not. Did the market’s oversight architecture give regulators, issuers and investors ENOUGH visibility to understand what was happening in real time? Then there is the information environment. Because every airport also has screens, announcements, signs etc. Airport people telling passengers where to look. So in MIA, while passengers, employees and even the airline itself are still asking what happened to the luggage and the flight plan, some monitors keep flashing: “TECHNICAL ISSUE” “PROCEDURES WERE FOLLOWED” “PLEASE REFER TO THE FAQ” “NOTHING TO SEE HERE” And then one airport monitor suddenly has a rather more awkward announcement... “RECORDS UPDATE: NEARLY A YEAR OF THE AIRPORT CHIEF’S TEXTS WERE LOST.” 🙈🙉🙊 (SOURCE: House Committee on Financial Services financialservices.house.gov/… and OIG 2025 review sec.gov/files/sec-oig-review…) Unfortunately, that missing-record window includes December 2022... when Flight MMTLP was halted! To be absolutely clear, that does not tell us what those missing messages contained. But it makes preservation of the documentary record rather important, doesn’t it? And the @SECGov Inspector General found something else worth reading carefully. - Some closed FOIA requests used language such as “all emails or other communications” or “any communications” ... yet Gensler’s text messages were not searched in those instances. - The OIG also found that recovered texts included substantive, mission-related SEC communications. So perhaps the better question is not: “What do we imagine was in the missing texts?” It is: “What records existed, what was preserved, what was searched, and what can now actually be reconstructed?” There is also a comical irony here.... While Gensler was Chair, the SEC brought recordkeeping cases against financial firms for failing to preserve electronic communications. In fiscal 2023 alone, according to the House Financial Services Committee, the SEC collected more than $400 million in settlements involving recordkeeping violations!!! And Gensler himself said firms “must maintain and preserve those communications” MIA AIRPORT POLICY: EVERYBODY MUST PRESERVE THEIR RECORDS. AIRPORT MANAGEMENT UNDER GENSLER: ...about that. 🤣 And somewhere in the corner, the social-media noise machine is doing what noise machines do best: Distract. Redirect. Mock. Confuse. Exhaust. That does not mean every journalist, commentator, critic or anonymous account is part of some coordinated scheme. It means narratives matter. And sophisticated market participants understand that very well. Which is why the serious question, in my opinion, is not: “Who is the villain?” It is: “What does the documentary record show?” Because eventually somebody has to stop listening to the airport announcements... ...and open the damn service door. Luckily, somebody did. That is where Rule 2004 discovery comes in.

Last night’s Space with @nbhydrocarbons CEO Greg McCabe, @annvandersteel, and @laralogan was the preview. Friday is the full #MMTLP interview with Lara and Greg, and everyone should tune in, even if you never owned the stock (trolls are welcome too). Because the legal filings are the part that do not need a microphone. If even a small part of what is alleged in the #MMAT Trustee’s complaint against Citadel, Anson and Virtu (who fought tooth and nail to NOT deliver their trading data/record) and what the litigation and discovery process may now surface, holds up, then this story becomes much bigger. And I doubt those three are the only act on the bill. In fact, around the 47-minute mark, Lara says it directly: this is impacting an “extraordinary number” of U.S.-listed companies. She is absolutely right to raise that point. Because if that is true, then this is not just one shareholder grievance or one unusual market event. That is a Pandora’s box the financial market system now has to confront. And when you eventually add crypto, tokenization, and 24/7 markets into that mix... the scale of the problem becomes exponential. At some point, the machinery around all of this needs a proper reckoning... not another wrist-slap dressed up as “industry self-regulation”, right? The longer @FINRA’s “financial industry” appears to protect its paying members… ehhh, sorry... nearly said customers!🤣… while retail investors and issuers are left completely in the dark, the harder that model becomes to defend. And no FINRA FAQ or stonewall can ever truly hide, reconcile, or settle the record after the fact. If self-regulation means the club looks after the club while everyone outside it absorbs the consequences, that is not regulation. It is a membership organization with a badge. Now here is the part people should appreciate. It has taken more than four years to catalogue and map this market plumbing: -10s of thousands of hours of research by hundreds of members of the MMTLP community. -Record setting 1,000+ FOIA requests. -Pro-bono lawyers. -Media. -Shareholders. -Ethical staffers in DC. And now AI tools... All working, in one form or another, toward resolution for more than 65,000 families. And in doing so, I am convinced it can also help educate Congress; so that future generations, entrepreneurs, investors, teachers, veterans, and the middle class more broadly, are better protected. Listening to yesterday’s Space, I kept thinking... HOW do you explain the #MMTLP fiasco to someone who doesn’t know a CUSIP from a boarding pass? How do you explain it to someone with no financial background? -At a family dinner. -At the bar with friends. -Over coffee with colleagues. -Or to a complete stranger. No technical jargon. No alphabet soup. No market-structure lecture... I’ve admittedly inflicted enough of those on people already! 😎 Just a picture everyone can understand. So I started placing all the actors we have come across over the last four or five years into one setting. Yes... including the trolls! (You know who you are🧌) Let’s place all of them in one place: an airport... Welcome to MIA: MARKET INTEGRITY AIRPORT Where market integrity occasionally goes missing in action. ...your departure board reads: FLIGHT: MMTLP DESTINATION: NEXT BRIDGE GATE: U3 STATUS: HALTED LUGGAGE: UNRECONCILED Next post: the airport.

Cannot wait. They managed to BK one company… we cannot let them continue to do the same to NBH or any other business. #FOG