Federal Reserve Bank of New York President William C. Dudley delivered opening remarks at the Workshop on the Risks of Wholesale Funding. The Workshop was held in New York on August 13, 2014 and was sponsored by the Federal Reserve Bank of Boston and the Federal Reserve Bank of New York. Mr. Dudley's remarks focused on the role of wholesale financing (such as money-market mutual funds and tri-party repo) in the financial crisis. As Mr. Dudley explained, in the years preceding the crisis, market participants came to rely on short-term funding to finance longer-term assets, creating maturity

The MSRB issued a request for comments from municipal market stakeholders on a proposal to enhance the public availability of municipal securities trade data on the MSRB's Electronic Municipal Market Access ("EMMA") Web site. Among the proposed new data elements are the following: (i) information about trades in new issues that result from conditional allocations by dealers, (ii) information regarding sale transactions by dealers that have long-term marketing agreements with underwriters, and (iii) information about transactions executed through alternative trading systems. Additionally, the

FINRA issued a regulatory notice regarding recent revisions to the Series 23 and 24 examination programs. Specifically, the revisions update the material to reflect changes in the laws, rules and regulations covered by the examinations and to incorporate the functions and associated tasks currently performed by a General Securities Principal. The changed content outlines will appear in the Series 23 and 34 examinations administered on or after October 13, 2014. See : FINRA Regulatory Notice 14-33. Related news: FINRA Proposes Rule Amendments to Revise Series 23 and 24 Examination Programs (Fed

In his speech at the New York Conference on the Risks of Wholesale Funding, President of the Federal Reserve Bank of Boston Eric S. Rosengren stated that there should be a "comprehensive re-evaluation" of the capital regulation of broker-dealers ( i.e., intermediaries that effect transactions in securities), given the lessons of the financial crisis. In other words, the capital regulations imposed on broker-dealers should be raised materially. According to Mr. Rosengren, the market's perception that broker-dealers were not financially sound because they did not hold enough capital resulted in

President Barack Obama signed into law a bill, titled the "Money Remittances Improvement Act of 2014" (Public Law No. 113-156), that authorizes the Secretary of the Treasury to utilize state examinations conducted by a state supervisory agency, rather than federal reporting requirements, for certain financial institutions. Specifically, the new law authorizes the Secretary of the Treasury, with respect to compliance and reporting requirements, to rely upon examinations conducted by a state supervisory authority if: (i) the institution is required to comply with federal requirements; and (ii)