On July 23, 2019, AFR Education Fund submitted a letter to the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) opposing a proposal that would create exemptions that would permit U.S. banks – and international banks active in the U.S. market – to do large-scale derivatives dealing in the U.S. without being designated as derivatives dealers under Dodd-Frank Act rules.
We strongly support using Consolidated Foreign Subsidiary (FCS) status as the basis for cross border enforcement rather than the more amorphous and subjective “guaranteed subsidiary” status. …We strongly disagree with the Commission’s proposal to exclude a wide range of transactions involving foreign branches and affiliates of U.S. swap dealers from external business conduct requirements.
We are deeply concerned that the Investment Company Institute (ICI) Letter lays out a set of changes to the Proposed Rule which wold effectively negate the derivatives exposure limits in the rule and render them useless as a tool for controlling speculative leverage at registered funds, as is required by the 1940 Act. …This change would not simply modify the relative weighting of derivatives exposures, but would result in a massive increase in the absolute limit on derivatives risk exposure.
“[T]he proposed Reg AT is long overdue. At the same time, however, the self-regulatory approach taken here falls far short of a clear set of limits on the most dangerous and predatory practices made possible by automated trading technology.”
“This week, the Commission faces key decisions in finalizing a crucial protection against derivatives risk, namely the rules governing mandatory provision of margin for derivatives transactions… In this letter, we wish to address one important area of these margin rules, namely requirements for inter-affiliate margin in transactions between swap dealers and affiliated entities. This issue has taken on increased prominence in recent months due to intense lobbying by major Wall Street banks to reduce or eliminate requirements for initial margin in inter-affiliate transactions. “
Download the letter here.
“Mandatory margin requires participants in the swaps market to take full account of the risks of their derivatives transactions and provide some level of advance provisioning for such risks. The availability of properly segregated margin is clearly of enormous value in case of the default of a swaps counterparty.”
“On behalf of Americans for Financial Reform (AFR), we write today to ask you to ensure appropriate regulatory oversight of derivatives transactions conducted through foreign subsidiaries of multinational Wall Street banks. In particular, we urge you to prevent the inappropriate classification of such derivatives as ‘non-guaranteed’ by the parent company, a classification which could exempt them from numerous critical derivatives regulations.”
AFR submitted a comment letter to the financial stability board on plans for the aggregation of global derivatives data.
AFR wrote to the banking regulators to urge them to strengthen the new supplementary leverage ratio proposed for large U.S. banks.