Apr. 20, 2022
To whom it may concern, I am a retail investor against the implementation of SR-NSCC-2022-003. One of the key tenets of a fair market, or any fair system in general, is one in which obligations and consequences for failing to meet them are consistent for all of its participants. Introducing novation at this stage reads as an admission that not only is there something wrong with the way risks and obligations are being managed but that the NSCC is willing to allow bad actors to retroactively escape from whatever mess they've created at the expense of other investors and companies associated with the relevant securities. In particular, it diminishes the value and purpose of public information regarding individual securities and the market as a whole; because market activities move the market in a feedback loop (or at least they're supposed to), contracts between explicit parties rarely have as many side effects on third parties as they do when securities are involved. One way to think about this is to consider the idea that when a transaction is carried out and backed by contract, every other investor in the market is arguably an implicit third party being represented by the NSCC--who agrees on their behalf to allow the transaction represented by the contract to take place, with the expectation that "rule of law" regarding the markets will be carried out when the obligations of the contract are not met. But If the NSCC will now allow the explicit parties of contracts to agree to rewrite reality through novation without taking an active interest in representing the investors who would be harmed by those actions (particularly with respect to retroactive agreements and how they shape the contour of the current market), the NSCC is effectively saying that it wants to be able to choose not to regulate when it wants to not regulate; that contracts and consequences only really have meaning when they aligns with the NSCC's interests (or at least don't get in its way), which through this proposal appear to side with larger investing entities that already struggle to be kept in check by self-regulatory organizations. Thank you for your time.