The Senate Agriculture Committee held a hearing that focused on the effects of high-frequency trading ("HFT") in the futures markets and allowed committee members to ask witnesses questions concerning HFT, latency and risk controls. Witnesses at the hearing included: Mr. Terrence Duffy, Executive Chairman and President, CME Group; Mr. Vince McGonagle, Director of the Division of Market Oversight of the CFTC; and Dr. Andrei Kirilenko, Professor of the Practice of Finance, MIT Sloan School of Management. Click here for a summary of the hearing by Delta Strategy Group. See: Senate Agriculture

The IRS updated its FATCA FAQs on the IRS website to explain how trustees of "trustee-documented trusts" are registered. Most Model 1 and Model 2 Intergovernmental Agreements under FATCA treat trusts with at least one trustee that is a Reporting U.S. Financial Institution, Reporting Model 1 Foreign Financial Institution ("FFI"), or participating FFI as certified deemed-compliant financial institutions, which means that the trust itself does not register under FATCA and the trustee is responsible for reporting all information with respect to U.S. reportable accounts of the trust. The new FAQ

The Board of Governors of the Federal Reserve System ("FRB") published a Finance and Economics Discussion Series ("FEDS") working paper titled "Machines vs. Machines: High Frequency Trading and Hard Information," written by Yesol Huh. The paper focuses on whether, and in what circumstances, high-frequency trading ("HFT") provides liquidity to the market, arguing that HFT liquidity-takers' use of machine-readable information causes an information asymmetry, which becomes more severe when markets are volatile. Using a statistical approach to measure HFT activity, the author argues that the

Linked below is an article featured in the Energy Metro Desk series, "Drums along the Potomac," which discusses the recent attention to market rigging and examines how regulators plan to address high-frequency trading ("HFT"). According to the article, the upcoming CFTC Technology Advisory Committee ("TAC") meeting will focus on an in-depth discussion of HFT. When asked about the upcoming meeting in an interview in Energy Metro Desk, Commissioner O'Malia said, "I don’t want to overstate the political on this. I think people want to be informed and prepared on these issues, of the assertions

The CFTC announced that its Technology Advisory Committee ("TAC") will hold a public meeting on June 3, 2014, to discuss issues related to high-frequency trading, the CFTC surveillance program and swap execution facilities. See: CFTC Press Release.