In a Joint Statement, the Bank of England ("BoE"), the Financial Conduct Authority ("FCA") and the CFTC said that the United Kingdom's withdrawal from the European Union would not serve to disrupt existing agreements as to the regulation, or exemptions from regulation, of firms engaged in the trading or clearing of derivatives. The parties said that: by the end of March 2019, the BoE, FCA and CFTC will put in place "information-sharing and cooperative arrangements to support the effective cross-border oversight of derivatives markets and participants and to promote market orderliness

The Congressional Research Service ("CRS") identified banking policy issues facing the 116th Congress. In the report, CRS highlighted the following issues: the extent to which "safety and soundness" regulations are effective and "appropriately balance benefits and costs"; whether regulations strike a balance between protecting consumers and ensuring access to credit and "justifiable compliance costs"; whether Community Reinvestment Act regulations are effective in encouraging banks to provide credit; whether relaxing large bank and "too big to fail" rules will provide relief for these banks or

The FDIC adopted examination procedures to monitor for compliance with the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau ("CFPB") final rule amendments expanding consumer protections for prepaid accounts ( i.e., the "Prepaid Accounts Rule"). FDIC examiners will utilize the revised interagency examination procedures to assess financial institutions' compliance with amended Regulation E and Regulation Z. As previously covered, the CFPB issued a final rule amending Regulation E (which implements the Electronic Fund Transfer Act) and Regulation Z (which implements the Truth in Lending Act). The effective

U.S. Treasury Department ("Treasury") final rules on reporting certain information in the U.S. repurchase agreement market to the Office of Financial Research ("OFR") were published in the Federal Register. The final rules are effective on April 22, 2019. As previously covered, the final rules will obligate certain U.S. central counterparties ("CCPs") to report daily on repo transactions. The primary purposes of the final rule are to (i) enable the Financial Stability Oversight Council and the OFR to identify and monitor risks to financial stability, and (ii) improve the calculations of

CFTC Chair J. Christopher Giancarlo highlighted the importance of ensuring that America's derivatives markets remain "open, orderly and highly liquid." He emphasized that U.S. global competitiveness requires America's derivatives markets to be regulated based on economic analysis, and not political concerns. He asserted that the superiority of the U.S. derivatives markets resulted from the fact that they are governed by an agency (the CFTC) that has created a regulatory framework that is "principles-based" with rules that are based on an "econometrically-driven analysis."