Financial Regulatory Forum

By Emmanuel Olaoye, Compliance Complete

The U.S. Chamber of Commerce has been a leader in contesting U.S. regulators’ implementation of the Dodd-Frank Act. Lawsuits challenging the Securities and Exchange Commission and Commodity Futures Trading Commission over the justification for the rules have stopped some rules in their tracks and forced the regulators to hire more economic analysts.

With a new Congress due to start on January 3, Compliance Complete sat down with three senior officials at the Chamber to discuss their priority issues for 2013. These include the Volcker rule banning risky trading by banks, exemptions for non-financial users of derivatives, the role of the Financial Stability Oversight Council in money-market fund reform. (more…)

By Emmanuel Olaoye, Compliance Complete

WASHINGTON, Dec. 24 (Thomson Reuters Accelus) - The U.S. Chamber of Commerce has been a leader in contesting U.S. regulators’ implementation of the Dodd-Frank Act. Lawsuits challenging the Securities and Exchange Commission and Commodity Futures Trading Commission over the justification for the rules have stopped some rules in their tracks and forced the regulators to hire more economic analysts.

With a new Congress due to start on January 3, Compliance Complete sat down with three senior officials at the Chamber to discuss their priority issues for 2013. These include the Volcker rule banning risky trading by banks, exemptions for non-financial users of derivatives, the role of the Financial Stability Oversight Council in money-market fund reform. (more…)

By Stuart Gittleman

NEW YORK, June 12 (Thomson Reuters Accelus) – A need to break up big banks is one of the several lessons policy makers should have learned from the financial crisis that have either been ignored or forgotten, according to Phil Angelides, who chaired the congressionally appointed Financial Crisis Inquiry Commission.

If the largest banks can only be run so recklessly that they harm the economy as well as themselves, they should be broken up, Angelides said in a talk at the Center for National Policy, an independent Washington D.C. think tank. (more…)

By Nick Paraskeva

NEW YORK, May 29 (Thomson Reuters Accelus) – U.S. regulators are looking to use new their oversight authority over foreign derivatives trades to reduce the chances of new shocks such as JPMorgan Chase & Co’s trading loss of at least $2 billion.

Pointing out that JPMorgan’s money-losing trades on a credit default swap index were conducted in a London unit, similar to recent failures at AIG and Lehman Brothers, Commodity Futures Trading Commission Chairman Gary Gensler said implementation of Dodd-Frank regulatory reform rules would improve supervision of such activity in the future by expanding cross-border oversight. (more…)

By Patricia Lee

NEW YORK, May 23 (Thomson Reuters Accelus) – The massive losses which resulted from JPMorgan Chase hedging its positions against derivatives has once again cast the spotlight on the Volcker Rule and whether systemically important financial institutions (SIFIs) are too big to fail, industry observers said. Questions have also been raised about the firm’s hedging strategy, and what constitutes hedging in the first place.

Industry officials in Asia suggested that JPMorgan’s $2 billion hedging losses might embolden regulators to strengthen the Volcker Rule, on the premise that it would be of benefit to SIFIs. The rule, named after former Federal Reserve chairman Paul Volcker, forms part of the Dodd-Frank Wall Street Reform and Consumer Protection Act and has proposed the separation of proprietary trading from commercial banking activity. Most notably, it has argued against investing in derivatives or using derivatives as a hedge on investments. The rule has, however, faced strong opposition from many of the large global financial institutions. (more…)

By Christopher Elias

LONDON/NEW YORK, May 17 (Business Law Currents) - JPMorgan’s disastrous $2 billion hedge loss has raised some thorny issues on management oversight, corporate governance and the effectiveness of the Volcker Rule, as division at the banking giant’s annual general meeting highlight a growing tension between its shareholders and management.

Little more than a week ago, prior to Tuesday’s annual general meeting (AGM), JPMorgan announced that it had incurred a $2 billion loss as a result of a hedge gone wrong from its London offices with the possibility of $1 billion in additional losses to follow. (more…)

By Rachel Wolcott

NEW YORK, May 14 (Thomson Reuters Accelus) - JPMorgan Chase & Co’s revelation that it had trading losses of at least $2 billion on a failed hedging strategy may have tipped the hand to one way Wall Street executives plan to get around the Volcker Rule.

The incident shows how firms could use the pending rule’s hedging exemption to do proprietary trades and still technically be compliant with Volcker. It could allow firms to keep some proprietary trading desks, but portray them to regulators as something else, such as portfolio hedging. (more…)

(Business Law Currents) – The global nature of business has perhaps never been more evident than in the wake of the U.S. housing crisis, the natural disasters in Japan and the ongoing European sovereign debt ruckus. Industries and national economies do not exist in a vacuum, nor do the regulatory changes which nations seek to implement in order to address widespread concerns.

The most recent example of the “extraterritorial” impact of a nation’s laws is a rule being promulgated under the Dodd-Frank Wall Street Reform and Consumer Protection Act (the Dodd-Frank Act). Released last October, the Volcker rule is a proposal to prohibit proprietary trading and hedge or private equity fund investments by banking entities. (more…)

Jan. 10 (Business Law Currents) — Global regulators have been anything but idle in 2011. Predictably, the U.S. regulatory landscape was dominated by the 800-lb. statutory gorilla, the Dodd-Frank Act. Canada busied itself trying to accommodate Basel III’s coming capital requirements. Anti-bribery regulation managed to elbow its way into UK headlines in spite of a phone hacking scandal and a royal wedding. China cracked down on loopholes for variable interest entities, while Australia’s new tax regime found few friends in the mining sector down under. (more…)

By Thomson Reuters Accelus staff

NEW YORK, Oct. 19 (Business Law Currents) – Banking lawyers should be forgiven if they’re not returning calls right away: they’re busy trying to digest the Volcker Rule (or “the rule”). The proposed rule’s 298-page doorstop represents the collective efforts of the Treasury Department, Fed, FDIC and SEC to implement §619 of the Dodd-Frank Act, which itself added a new §13 to the Bank Holding Company Act of 1956 (the BHC Act). The intent of the Volcker Rule is to “generally prohibit any banking entity from engaging in proprietary trading or from acquiring or retaining an ownership interest in, sponsoring, or having certain relationships with a hedge fund or private equity fund (“covered fund”), subject to certain exemptions.”

So does the Volcker Rule satisfy its mandate? To paraphrase ‘The Simpsons’: yes with an “if,” no with an “unless.” The rule carves out significant exemptions from the proscription against proprietary trading, but each of these exceptions has a number of criteria required to take advantage of the exemption. Moreover, a number of the rule’s measures provide for rebuttable presumptions of non-compliance for certain types of trading activity. (more…)