Andy Green, from the Center for American Progress and former SEC counsel, joined Yahoo Finance Live to discuss how the SEC should address the GameStop trading frenzy.

Video Transcript

SEANA SMITH: We want to stick with this topic. And for that, we want to bring in Andy Green. He served as counsel to SEC under the Obama administration. He’s also now a senior fellow for economic policy at American Progress. And Andy, it’s great to have you on “Yahoo Finance” today.

Just the question at hand– the role of regulators and how, I guess, they should be approaching this issue. First, just to get your perspective on what we’ve seen happen with this speculative frenzy surrounding names like GameStop and AMC over the last couple of weeks.

ANDY GREEN: Yeah. You know, we’re still learning things new about what went on every single day. I think the financial markets can move quickly. And those who are up can end up down. Those who are down can end up up. So I think that’s why it’s really important for investors to be prudent, to be looking for the long term, to be aware of the basics about not borrowing on margin and taking risks that they can’t afford.

And that’s why we need regulators on the beat, keeping up with the rules, to keep up with new technologies and new technological platforms like we’re seeing with Reddit and other things. And also putting in place the technological oversight– the tools necessary to monitor markets.

There’s a monitoring tool called the Consolidated Audit Trail. It’s a bit of a wonky term. We call it the CAT. It has been proposed for more than a decade. And regulators– the SEC under the Trump administration and even further back than that at the end of the Obama administration– you know, they dragged their feet on getting it done. And now the result of that is that it is a lot harder for the SEC to see what’s going on in these fast-moving markets. So–