Speech

Thank you, Peter, for that introduction.  I appreciate the opportunity to be part of this conference.  I do have a couple of disclaimers. 

I will begin with our standard SEC disclaimer: The views that I will express today are my own and do not necessarily represent those of the Commission or my fellow Commissioners.  Indeed, with respect to one particular issue I will be discussing today, my disagreement with my colleagues is sufficiently public and pronounced that it may not even warrant a disclaimer.  I speak, of course, of my dissent from the Commission’s decision to reject an exchange-traded product that was designed to give investors access to bitcoin.[1] 

In response to my dissent, I was informally dubbed CryptoMom.  I always have wanted to be a mother, so acquiring this new title was quite an honor. Admittedly, this is not the form of motherhood I envisioned, but one of the wonderful aspects of motherhood is that children are quite different than their mothers anticipated they would be.

If I were a mother, I suspect that I would be a free-range mother rather than a helicopter mom.  A helicopter mother hovers over her child in order to ensure the child’s success, although this strategy often backfires.[2]  A free-range mother, by contrast, encourages her child to explore with limited supervision, which requires the acceptance of a certain level of risk.[3]  Japanese television affords us a real-life example of this type of parenting in a show called “My First Errand,” which portrays children—some under the age of five—going on errands alone.[4]  Episodes of the show are worth watching, not only for the inevitable laughter and tears they produce, but for the light they shed on the fact that risk-taking is not inherently bad.  To the contrary, certain achievements are possible only if we take risks.

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