Ending much media speculation, Barclays officials announced that the bank has named industry veteran James E. Staley to be its new top executive, signaling the start of a new era for a firm shaken by legal battles with government authorities and regulators, sudden executive shuffles and layoffs. Staley has been appointed as Group CEO of… Read More >>
SEC Enforcement Actions Jump 7 Percent in 2015
The SEC’s Enforcement Division reports that it had a seven percent increase in cases for fiscal year 2015 over the previous year and is breaking ground in several facets of the securities industry because of data and quantitative analytics and the help of the regulator’s other divisions. “The Enforcement Division’s leveraging of data, quantitative analytics… Read More >>
CLS, TriOptima Team Up for FX Compression Service
CLS Group (CLS), a specialist settlement bank for the global foreign exchange (FX) market, and TriOptima, a vendor focusing on over-the-counter (OTC) derivatives post-trade services, are behind the launch of the triReduce CLS Forward FX Compression Service that combines the CLS infrastructure with TriOptima’s compression offering, officials say. Compression is the practice of canceling out… Read More >>
Obama Announces Nominees for SEC Commissioners
The SEC may have a full slate of commissioners by the end of the year as the Obama administration has put forth two nominees — one to fill a current vacancy and another to step in for Commissioner Luis A. Aguilar, who completed his term this year. Aguilar has been serving since 2008 when he… Read More >>
The SEC’s ‘Broken Windows’ Policy
Given some of the recent actions by the SEC, it’s reasonable to ask if the regulator may be enforcing a kind of “broken windows policing” effort. When put into practice, the broken windows theory as applied to non-Wall Street crime by police officers involves acting upon “small crimes such as vandalism, public drinking, and toll-jumping,”… Read More >>
New Collateral Management, Margining Rules to Sting as Regulation Takes Hold
Securities firms are going to feel over the coming months multiple stings of regulation via Dodd-Frank, the EU’s European Market Infrastructure Regulation (EMIR) legislation and Basel III that will cause collateral management and margining requirements and calls to skyrocket. So says industry veteran Ted Leveroni, chief commercial officer for DTCC-Euroclear GlobalCollateral Ltd., a joint venture… Read More >>
SEC to Ease Up on Key Internal Court Burdens
Should the cop on the beat be able to appoint the judges who hear the case against the defendants that get hauled in? That, essentially, is the central criticism of the SEC’s system of internal administrative law judges and its various rules and procedures that allegedly disadvantage defendants. Now, the SEC has responded to the… Read More >>
CFTC Signs MOU with Korean Regulators
The CFTC, the Korean Financial Services Commission (FSC) and the Korean Financial Supervisory Service (FSS) have signed a memorandum of understanding (MOU) regarding “cooperation and the exchange of information in the supervision and oversight of clearing organizations that operate on a cross-border basis in the United States and in the Republic of Korea,” the CFTC… Read More >>
Looking for a Few Silver Linings
For this week’s posting, I purposely tried to find news items that if not necessarily good news had some silver linings of hope and progress. I found three via my random, unscientific search. SEC Achieves Early $30 Million Settlement in Newswire Hacking Case The first piece I hit upon was the news from the SEC… Read More >>
Is ‘Too Big to Fail’ Too Big to Fix?
(Editor’s note: This is the second part of a two-part series on the problem of financial services firms that are “Too Big to Fail” and therefore must be propped up during an economic crisis at taxpayers’ expense. This problem became acute during the Great Recession and many had hoped reform legislation such as the Dodd-Frank… Read More >>
