CFTC Chairman Gary Gensler delivered remarks before the U.S. Chamber of Commerce Seventh Annual Capital Markets Summit regarding the need to move on from the continued use of LIBOR, Euribor and similar benchmark interest rates. Chairman Gensler said the shift away from banks funding each other in the unsecured market (without posting collateral) has led to a scarcity or outright absence of actual transactions underpinning LIBOR and other benchmark rates. As a result of having benchmark rates not anchored in actual transactions, he said that market integrity has been undermined and the

The United Kingdom, Germany, France, Italy and Spain have signed an agreement establishing a pilot multilateral information exchange facility based on the U.S. FATCA Model 1 Agreement that each country has entered, or intends to enter, into with the United States. In a letter to EU Commissioner Algirdas Semeta, the five EU members called the U.S. FATCA Intergovernmental Agreements a "step change in tax transparency" and said that the pilot project will provide "a template as to the wider multilateral agreement we hope to see in due course." The five countries invited other EU countries to join

The SEC announced that Mary Jo White was sworn in this morning as the 31st Chair of the Commission. View Press Release in full here (links externally to SEC website). See also: White's Biography; Senate Confirms Mary Jo White as SEC Chair.For a compilation of recent news items relating to personnel changes, primarily at the regulators, link to Current Topics - Personnel.

The Bahamas Ministry of Finance hosted a two-day workshop on FATCA in Nassau on April 9 and 10, which representatives from over 10 countries throughout the Caribbean and Central America attended. Danielle Rolfes, International Tax Counsel at the U.S. Treasury Department, Michael Danilack, Deputy Commissioner (International) of the U.S. Internal Revenue Service, and several other Treasury and IRS officials also attended the conference and met in bilateral discussions with various countries at the conference. In his opening remarks at the Conference, L. Ryan Pinder, Bahamas Minister of Financial

The CFTC issued an Order requiring Interactive Brokers LLC ("IB"), an FCM and Retail Foreign Exchange Dealer, to pay a $225,000 civil monetary penalty for violations of the CFTC's segregation and supervision requirements. IB was faulted for failing to compute daily, on a currency-by-currency basis, the amount of customer funds required to be on deposit and the amount of customer funds actually on deposit in segregated accounts on behalf of commodity and options customers; failing to maintain sufficient U.S. dollars ("USD") in customer segregated accounts in the United States to meet all USD