For more than a century, America’s stock listings have been dominated by two addresses: Wall Street’s New York Stock Exchange and Nasdaq’s MarketSite in Times Square. That may soon change. On September 30, 2025, the US Securities and Exchange Commission approved the Texas Stock Exchange (TXSE) to operate as a national securities exchange.

Headquartered in Dallas and backed by major financial institutions, TXSE plans to begin trading in early 2026 — marking the first serious challenge in decades to the entrenched exchange duopoly and opening a new chapter for American capital markets.

Texas offers both symbolism and substance for such an endeavor. With roughly $2.7 trillion in annual economic output, the state represents about one-tenth of the entire US economy. It is home to more than a tenth of the nation’s publicly listed companies, and its mix of rapid growth, favorable taxes, and business-friendly regulation makes it a natural candidate for a financial hub. The creation of a new national exchange in Dallas isn’t just a regional milestone — it’s a sign that financial innovation is no longer bound to Manhattan’s geography or culture.

The Texas Stock Exchange aims to reintroduce competition into a sector that has grown listless and increasingly consolidated. It’s undoubtedly true that the existing exchanges have played a crucial role in maintaining transparency and corporate accountability; their listing standards have strengthened governance and investor protections. Yet those same regulatory frameworks have also drifted into areas far removed from financial performance. In recent years, both the NYSE and Nasdaq have woven social and political priorities — what critics describe as wokeness — into disclosure and board-composition rules. They are costly distractions from capital formation. The TXSE proposes a more neutral approach: maintaining high financial and ethical standards while allowing firms to focus on profitability, innovation, and shareholder value.

What distinguishes the TXSE is not a break from federal oversight — the SEC will supervise it under the same 1934 Exchange Act framework — but a fresh philosophy of exchange governance. Its listing rules, approved by the SEC in late 2025, emphasize issuer friendliness without relaxing quantitative standards. Companies may request confidential pre-application eligibility reviews at no cost, an innovation that can save months of uncertainty and advisory fees. The exchange also plans lower recurring costs and streamlined compliance obligations, designed to appeal especially to midsize and emerging-growth firms that find New York’s red tape prohibitive. For issuers, the advantages are procedural rather than ideological: less bureaucracy, clearer guidance, and faster time to market — all within the same legal protections that govern other national exchanges.

Importantly, the TXSE is not creating a parallel arbitration or mediation framework distinct from existing US securities law. Disputes will remain under conventional regulatory and judicial channels. What TXSE offers instead is predictability and professional competence — a governance regime grounded in financial expertise rather than social activism or politicized mandates. Texas’s recent corporate-law reforms, offering expanded safe harbors for directors and officers of Texas-based or TXSE-listed corporations, further reinforce that business-friendly environment.

Publicly traded companies are not abstract entities — they are the backbone of the US economy. Collectively, they employ roughly 28 million Americans, investing hundreds of billions each year in facilities, equipment, research, and expansion. Publicly traded paper also allows firms that might not be cash-rich to acquire or merge with others, achieving efficiencies of scale, spreading innovation faster, and delivering better and more affordable products and services to consumers. When those firms can operate and raise capital efficiently, the benefits ripple widely through communities and households alike.

If successful, the TXSE’s impact may reach far beyond the companies it lists. A dynamic marketplace disciplines incumbents: the very existence of a new exchange could push legacy venues to innovate, lower costs, and revisit how they define “best practices.” As competition increases, issuers may find not only a cheaper but also a fairer playing field — one where governance expectations are tied to financial prudence rather than fashionable politics.

Building an exchange is no small task. To achieve price discovery, a critical mass of liquidity is necessary, and accumulating that liquidity depends on both performance and confidence. The NYSE, Nasdaq, and other market centers have deep, long-established pools of trading activity that reinforce their dominance. For TXSE to thrive, it must persuade a broad array of market participants — from investment banks and hedge funds to retail brokerages and pension funds — that Dallas can host a market as vibrant and reliable as New York’s. (JP Morgan has already asserted its view on that matter.) That will require trust, technological strength, and seamless integration with the national trading network.

Yet Texas’s position is unusually strong. Its economy is vast and diversified; its infrastructure modern; its talent base deep in both finance and energy technology. A more geographically diverse system of exchanges spreads operational risk, encourages regional specialization, and gives investors and entrepreneurs alternatives to the cultural and regulatory monolith that New York has become. TXSE’s lower listing costs, emphasis on issuer engagement, and alignment with Texas’s pro-business climate make it the most credible new exchange entrant in generations.

To the uninitiated observer, another stock exchange might sound redundant, or more cynically like another gaming venue for the wealthy. The current US President, in fact, once expressed the view that the New York Stock Exchange is “the biggest casino in the world.” 

In truth, exchanges are the plumbing of capitalism — the place where savings become investment and new industries find their footing. By one account, Ludwig von Mises once commented that stock exchanges are ultimately the dividing line between market and collectivist economic systems. Murray Rothbard recounted (“Making Economic Sense”):

One time I asked Professor von Mises, the great expert on the economics of socialism, at what point on this spectrum of statism would he designate a country as “socialist” or not. At that time, I wasn’t sure that any definite criterion existed to make that sort of clear-cut judgment. And so I was pleasantly surprised at the clarity and decisiveness of Mises’s answer. “A stock market,” he answered promptly. A stock market is crucial to the existence of capitalism and private property. For it means that there is a functioning market in the exchange of private titles to the means of production. There can be no genuine private ownership of capital without a stock market: there can be no true socialism if such a market is allowed to exist.

A more competitive and decentralized exchange system strengthens that foundation and keeps commercial blood flowing through the country’s economic arteries.

Despite socialistic structural rigidities, changes are coming to US financial markets, albeit slowly. With its regulatory green light secured, and trading expected to begin in early 2026, the Texas Stock Exchange represents more than a new address for American capital markets. It is a bet on openness, competition, and the belief that — just as in the marketplace for ideas — the market for capital works best when it is competitive and free.

With SNAP funding in the news, we’re seeing a revival of a familiar complaint against big business. The reason millions of Americans need public benefits like SNAP, critics say, is that their employers don’t pay them enough.

As one columnist recently put it, corporations “have taken advantage of Medicaid, food stamps, and other safety net programs for years to get out of paying their workers a living wage by sticking the taxpayers with the expense.” These corporations are to blame for people’s need for public assistance, and they should pay their workers more so that they’ll rely less on safety net programs funded by taxpayers. 

But this complaint is morally confused. To see why, let’s start with a simple point: an employer is a buyer of labor. So when critics say that big corporations should raise their employees’ wages to the point where they don’t need public assistance, what they’re really saying is that corporations should pay more for what they buy. But we shouldn’t assume that merely buying something from someone obligates you to pay them so much that they never need public assistance, rather than simply paying them the mutually agreeable price. 

Here’s an analogy. Scarlett likes to buy scarves from Wes on eBay. Whenever Wes lists a scarf for auction, Scarlett makes the highest bid. In short, she’s his best customer. But times get tough for Wes. He begins to struggle to pay rent and buy groceries. Scarlett keeps winning the auctions for Wes’s scarves and sending payments his way, but it’s not enough to keep him off SNAP.

Politicians and commentators learn about Wes’s situation and place the blame squarely on one person: Scarlett.

If only she had paid more than the auction price for his scarves, they argue, Wes wouldn’t need SNAP benefits. According to one columnist, “Scarlett is taking advantage of the government’s safety net to get out of paying Wes enough to live on and sticking taxpayers with the expense.” 

The moral condemnation of Scarlett would be downright bizarre, and it’s not hard to see why. Remember, Scarlett is Wes’s best customer — she offers more for his scarves than anyone else. If anything, we should have the least complaint against her. She’s already given Wes thousands of dollars while other customers have given him less or nothing at all. Scarlett is doing more than anyone else to benefit Wes, so it’s strange to single her out for blame. 

Now turn back to big businesses like Walmart and Amazon. Just as Scarlett is Wes’s best customer, so too is Walmart its employees’ best customer — that is, it made them the best offer for their labor.

We know this because if Walmart hadn’t made them the best offer, those employees would be working somewhere else instead. Workers accept the best offer for their labor just as weavers accept the best offer for their scarves. So, as with Scarlett, we should have the least complaint against Walmart, not the most. Other employers either made Walmart workers worse offers or made them no offer at all. Since Walmart is doing more than anyone else to benefit Walmart workers, it’s strange to single it out for blame. 

You might reply that I’m overthinking things. The simple truth is that Walmart should pay its employees more because it can afford to pay them more. But this view assumes you’re obligated to pay more for something simply because you can afford to do so — and that’s a dubious assumption. 

Think back to Scarlett. Suppose that she could afford to pay Wes more for his scarf than what turned out to be the winning bid. While it might be generous of her to do so, that seems more like charity than fulfilling an obligation. When someone sells you a scarf, a cup of coffee, a gym membership, or an hour of labor, you don’t thereby incur a duty to pay them whatever it takes to fix their personal finances. You simply owe them the agreed-upon price. 

And that agreed-upon price isn’t arbitrary — it reflects supply and demand in the case of labor just as it does for anything else. A scarf sells at a price where someone is willing to buy it and someone else is willing to let it go. Labor is no different: wages settle where workers are willing to offer their time and employers are willing to buy it. If the wage is set too high, people will be less likely to hire workers; if it’s too low, people will be less likely to work.

Even if you insist that rich customers like Scarlett do have a moral obligation to pay Wes more for his scarves, it doesn’t follow that government officials should force her to do so. The mere fact that you should do something — be it paying more for a scarf, driving a good friend to the airport, or visiting your sick sibling in the hospital — doesn’t establish that it’s the government’s job to make you do it. Plus, forcing Wes to raise his prices would likely backfire: if the government required Scarlett and other customers to pay more for his scarves, they’d be less likely to buy them, leaving Wes even worse off than before. 

The parallel to employers is clear. Even if you think that buyers of labor should pay more if they can afford to do so, it doesn’t follow that the state should make them. And here again, the proposed policy would probably backfire: by making workers costlier to hire, it would discourage employers from buying their labor at all — leaving them not with higher wages, but with no job. At the bare minimum, we should ensure that any policy intended to benefit workers doesn’t harm the very people it aims to help. 

About a year ago, I was in a room full of financial professionals explaining how the corporate engagement firm I work for, Bowyer Research, is dialoguing with Apple on the issue of child safety. Discussing the best ways to combat online child sex abuse material (CSAM) is not a fun story. As I explained the reality of Apple’s CSAM problem, in a room largely made up of Apple users, I saw a lot of concerned expressions and awkward glances at iPhones on conference tables. It’s an understandable reaction. But it drives home the point that those of us in this industry wake up every day trying to make— and I said as much.

Child exploitation is what predators do with their iPhones. Stopping child exploitation is what we’re doing with *our* iPhones.

Let me back up. My day job, corporate engagement, involves helping shareholders of companies like Apple use their financial influence to have conversations about issues at the world’s biggest brands. Oftentimes, these conversations surround corporate politicization, ESG, DEI, and the like. But, during the past two years, we’ve been having conversations at Apple about something more bipartisan: stopping the distribution of child sex abuse material.

It’s a conversation that needs to happen. The company that gave us the iPhone has driven some of the most successful and recognizable innovations in the modern world. But Apple has also staked out a definite position in the privacy-versus-oversight debate. Those incredibly high-profile privacy commitments are ingrained into the company’s ethos, and it’s for that reason that engaging them on the issue of online child safety has been such a complicated endeavor. Despite Apple’s commitments to human rights and its stated belief that “business can and should be a force for good,” the company’s been facing down a massive CSAM distribution issue. Apple recently was the subject of a $1.2 billion class action lawsuit, with victims of child sex abuse alleging that the company didn’t appropriately address videos of their abuse being distributed on platforms such as iMessage. Apple notably rolled back a planned anti-CSAM technology called NeuralHash in 2022 over privacy concerns, sparking criticism from child safety organizations.

It’s not that the technology didn’t exist, but that Apple decided the cost-benefit analysis wasn’t in its favor. That decision, right or wrong, has had real-world consequences, including significant legal liability for Apple. Investors are therefore right to ask how the company arrived at the decision to roll back the software.

This isn’t merely a moral point but an economic one (and in an aspirationally free and virtuous society, those two are connected). It was time for shareholders to get involved. Last year, Bowyer Research filed a shareholder proposal at Apple on behalf of American Family Association, an Apple investor, asking the company to publicly report the costs and benefits of not deploying anti-CSAM software. The proposal received enough shareholder support for us to bring it back this year. More importantly, it gained us several productive discussions with the company to discuss child safety.

We’d all do well to remember that the issues and decisions facing America’s biggest companies are not merely issues to be opined about by external nonprofits, NGOs, and pundits (although countless admirable, constructive examples of such entities exist). They were investor-to-company discussions. 

Shareholders, the individuals and institutions who own Apple and are literally bought into its business model and responsibility for continued success, deserve a larger and more serious role in that discussion. In a properly functioning company with a fiduciary duty to its investors, CEOs work for boards, and boards for shareholders. Investors, whose continued returns depend on companies making the right decisions, absolutely have something to say about controversial issues that those companies must navigate. Apple’s choices on combating online child abuse are no different.

And those discussions yielded results. After two years of constructive engagement from the American Family Association, along with increased legislative scrutiny regarding age protections from red states like Utah and Texas, Apple adopted changes to its child safety protocols: restrictions on underage users viewing adult-rated apps in its App Store and stringent explicit content filtering for underage users on iMessage.

This is a major win. Not just for investors, but for the almost 90 percent of teens who reportedly own iPhones. It’s a big step in the right direction to make sure that online predators have fewer tools to abuse children online. And it’s an indicator of yet another point that those of us in the corporate engagement world wake up every day to defend: genuine shareholder advocacy creates real impact.

For a long time, people have defended the idea that the best approach to values-based investing is screening out any problematic stocks from a portfolio (common categories are defense stocks, energy companies that prioritize fossil fuels, and the like). But right now, results we’re seeing at the world’s most valuable brand indicate there’s a more impactful approach than screening.

When you screen a company out of your portfolio, you give up your leverage with that company, bringing your investor influence to zero. But when you use your investor influence to dialogue about the issues that impact the companies you own (and therefore, impact your future), you are maximizing your investor influence. It’s not just Apple — we’re seeing results at companies across sectors, from viewpoint protections at JPMorgan Chase to depoliticized corporate policies at tech giants like IBM. Shareholder advocacy like the American Family Association’s gets discussions, builds relationships, and creates genuine change.

Too often, we talk about fixing businesses as if companies can only ever choose between doing the morally correct thing or making money. This is false framing. When it comes to child safety, Apple is making the right move not only for its youngest and most vulnerable users but for the investors who depend on its continued success for their financial future. And we’re right to celebrate that as a win for the shareholder advocacy model. This isn’t a moment to lean out and divest.

Democratic Socialism, at least recently, is a growth brand. According to The Nation, between 2016 and 2020 membership in the Democratic Socialists of America (DSA) grew from 6,000 to over 90,000. And an article at reformandrevolution.org — the website of a “revolutionary Marxist caucus” of the DSA — claimed that after the 2024 presidential election the DSA experienced “a 5-6 times increase in new recruits.” 

The group’s political success also impresses. Nationally prominent politicians such as Rashida Tlaib and Zohran Mamdani are formal members. Others, such as Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and Bernie Sanders, self-identify as democratic socialists. 

Hoping to understand the brand’s cachet, and how long its growth may last, one night I dropped down the DSA rabbit hole to experience it for myself. Several videos from the 2025 national convention, which took place in Chicago in early August, are available on YouTube. 

A roundtable discussion titled “The Left and The Family” first caught my eye. Onstage, four women wearing facemasks led the discussion. They seemed despondent at the state of the US under Trump. 

“We are in an extremely reactionary moment. We are in a fascist moment,” one said, before introducing the idea of “family abolition.” There followed some soul-searching about what this term means. The panelists were not against familial relationships per se, but rather against the “white patriarchal” nuclear family as a foundation of society. 

The conversation wound between ideas both defensible (“it’s a myth that there is one mother to any of us,”) and absurd (child protective services exist to channel children into prison so they can serve as cheap labor for capitalists). Overall, sentiment favored a future in which interpersonal life will have less to do with family and more to do with the collective.  

To me, it didn’t sound like a future to relish. And given the DSA’s meteoric rise to relevance, the room overall seemed to be light on joie de vivre. Had newly elected New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani been present, his persistently earnest smile might have leavened the vibe a bit. 

Or maybe I just needed something more remedial to help get my head around the DSA mindset. An older video offered a slideshow on basic socialism narrated by the DSA’s national co-chair, Megan Romer. It was candid, enlightening, and reasonably upbeat. My first light-bulb moment came when Romer explained how becoming a socialist is not typically an involved intellectual process. 

“Most people become socialist because of one issue,” Romer said. “They usually become socialists because of something they specifically got mad about in the news. That is the primary thing that makes people become a socialist.” 

It struck me as odd. I don’t recall anger playing a big role in my support for capitalism, other than maybe learning the plight of independent thinkers in places like the Soviet Union or Maoist China. 

Being an economics major in college, there was also an intellectual aspect to my worldview. It formed slowly as I gained insight into the beneficial organizing power of free markets. Capitalism may not create social utopias, but at least it generates the greatest level of economic wealth in human history. 

The slideshow continued with an explanation of Marxism. The highlight was a slide with a laid-back-looking Karl Marx in a convertible (something capitalist economies have likely produced far better than communist). “Get in loser,” the caption read; “We’re seizing the means of production.” 

From there, the presentation bogged down in industrial-age tropes of leisurely, cigar-chomping capitalists, whom Romer termed “bosses,” and their exploited proletariat workforce. Two centuries after Marx, socialism has trouble reckoning with capitalism’s social mobility and its expansion and empowerment of the middle class.  

Though I don’t consider myself a proletarian, I’ve had many bosses in my career, some better than others. But the truth is that most worked longer hours than I did. And almost all had more experience than me. This probably explains why their paychecks were bigger than mine. Socialism, however, is a narrative that needs a cartoonish villain, and the capitalist overlord oppressing underlings provides it.  

In the end, I came out of the DSA rabbit hole unswayed to socialism. But maybe winning arguments isn’t the group’s main goal. My second lightbulb moment had come when Romer informed the audience that they should not expect socialism to gain power through a contest of ideas. 

“Power only cedes itself to a greater degree of power,” she said. “We win by making conditions so intolerable for the ruling class that they would rather give in to our demands than continue to live with the disturbance we cause, until we are able to fully seize power ourselves.” 

There is an old saying that those who are not communist before age 30 have no heart, and those who are still communist after age 30 have no brain. The heart is not only the seat of affection but of anger, something few people had more of than Karl Marx. From what I saw, modern democratic socialists are carrying his legacy forward with hearts that have moved from anger to a desire for control. In the end, seizing the means of production requires control of not only private businesses, natural resources, and factories, but human bodies and minds. It’s a road many nations have gone down with tragic results. Let’s hope the US isn’t next. 

Social media has been discussing Fannie Mae’s announcement that the organization will no longer require a minimum credit score of 620 for mortgages. Is this a big deal?

Likely not. Freddie Mac has already dropped its minimum credit score requirement. These requirements applied to the automated underwriting process for mortgages. (Underwriting is the process that determines whether someone is eligible for a loan and under what terms.) The government-supported enterprises (GSEs) also offer a manual underwriting process for more complex cases.

Credit scores will still matter for both forms of underwriting, but abandoning a hard minimum means that someone with a credit score just below the prior minimum will now be able to get a mortgage so long as they are reducing credit risk in other ways, such as by offering a large down payment. Some borrowers with credit scores below 620 may in fact be good risks, at least at the rate offered by the lender.

The GSEs have an immense amount of data at their disposal to develop models to predict the risk that any particular borrower will default. If they are doing good actuarial work to predict those risks and price mortgage loans appropriately, there is no need for them to maintain an arbitrary minimum credit score.

I’ve been critical of counterproductive proposals to try to make housing more affordable and available by subsidizing demand. The 50-year mortgage proposal floated by Bill Pulte, the Federal Housing Finance Agency director, deservedly faced a lot of questions and now appears dead. (His new proposal to allow “portable” mortgages in which homebuyers can keep the terms, especially the interest rates, of mortgages on the houses they are leaving could be a better idea, depending on implementation. It could reduce mortgage lock-in and free up new homes for sale.)

But the new Fannie Mae rule seems to be a technical adjustment rather than a result of political pressure to make more loans. Private mortgage lenders will still be able to apply their own credit score minimums, and credit scores will still play a big role in the mortgage guarantees that Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac offer. The social media outrage cycle seems to have jumped the gun on this one.

It is with great sadness that we mark the recent passing of former AIER Chairman of the Board of Trustees and longstanding Voting Member, Gregory (Gregg) M. van Kipnis on the evening of Saturday, November 8, 2025, in New York.

A student of the Austrian economist Ludwig von Mises at New York University where he obtained his MBA in economics and finance, Gregg had a long and distinguished career in finance, business, and banking. Among many other positions, he served as President and CEO of Invictus Partners; Executive Vice President at Jefferies & Co.; Managing Director of NatWest Financial Products in London; and a Principal at Morgan Stanley. In his early career, Gregg was an economist and research director at Donaldson Lufkin & Jenrette, as well as the IBM Corporation. Most recently, Gregg was a General Partner and then consultant to the Tiedemann Investment Group. He was also a member of the boards of directors of several financial firms.

Throughout his life, and as a sign of his commitment to a society of free and responsible people, Gregg was involved in several philanthropic activities and professional associations. Additionally, Gregg taught courses in topics ranging from capital markets, microeconomics, and corporate finance at Spring Hill College, the University of South Alabama, and American University. Gregg also served as a captain in the United States Air Force from 1968-1971, which included time at the Pentagon.

A longtime supporter of AIER and its mission, Gregg became Chairman of the Board of Trustees in 2016 and remained in that position through 2024. He was also Chairman of the Board of Directors of American Investment Services (AIS), an SEC Registered Investment Adviser founded in 1978 and wholly owned by AIER.

In all these governance capacities, Gregg made substantial and lasting contributions to AIER’s growth and vitality, for which he sought no acknowledgment, and which played an indispensable role in establishing AIER as one of America’s leading classical liberal and free market institutions. For all these things as well as his counsel and guidance, the Board of Trustees and staff of AIER and AIS are deeply grateful.

In forthcoming weeks, there will be remembrances of Gregory M. van Kipnis by people who knew him well. But on behalf of AIER, we extend our deepest condolences to his beloved wife, Theresa (Terry), his daughters, and his extended family.

Terry W. Anker, Chairman of the Board of Trustees, AIER

Samuel Gregg, President (Interim), AIER