The Federal Financial Institutions Examination Council, Office of the Comptroller of the Currency, Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation, and Board of Governors of the Federal Reserve System (collectively, the "Federal Banking Regulators") requested public comment on a set of proposed regulatory categories regarding outdated or unnecessary regulations applied to insured depository institutions. Review and identification of such categories is required by the Economic Growth and Regulatory Paperwork Reduction Act of 1996. The Federal Banking Regulators requested comments on the following topics

Exchanges affiliated with the CME Group, including the New York Mercantile Exchange ("NYMEX") and Commodities Exchange Inc. ("COMEX"), announced multiple disciplinary actions in which monetary fines ranging from $7,500 to $1.75 million were imposed. NYMEX found that Advantage Futures, LLC, on the last trading date for the physically settled August 2014 Crude Oil futures contract, failed to ensure that an open position held on its books in the physically delivered Crude Oil futures contract was liquidated in an orderly manner prior to the expiration of trading, thereby violating NYMEX Rule 716

The CFTC staff announced it will hold a public roundtable discussion on March 5, 2015 on recovery and orderly wind-down of derivatives clearing organizations ("DCOs"). According to the CFTC, the goal of the roundtable discussion is to gather views from a variety of stakeholders, including DCOs, their clearing members (futures commission merchants), and the customers of their clearing members (including money managers, end-users, and others). The roundtable discussion will be broken into four sessions, which will discuss: (i) variation margin gains haircutting, (ii) re-establishing a matched

The SEC held a roundtable discussion on ways to improve the proxy voting process ("proxy process"). Panelists discussed topics such as universal proxy ballots and strengthening retail shareholder participation. Commissioners Gallagher and Aguilar also issued public statements. In his opening remarks, Commissioner Gallagher stated that he is interested in evaluating the ways in which the SEC can improve retail shareholders' participation in the proxy process. According to Commissioner Gallagher, retail shareholders are "famously rationally ignorant" of the proxy process, which at times can be

The SEC charged the brokerage firm VCAP Securities ("VCAP") and its CEO with defrauding and deceiving other market participants while conducting auctions to liquidate collateralized debt obligations ("CDOs"). An SEC investigation found that VCAP and its CEO improperly arranged for a third-party broker-dealer to bid secretly at these same auctions on behalf of their affiliated investment adviser, which VCAP did in order to acquire certain bonds to benefit the funds that it managed and served as a liquidation agent. According to the SEC, VCAP had access to all of the confidential bidding