SEC Commissioner Luis A. Aguilar delivered a speech at an SEC Investor Advisory Committee (IAC) meeting, in which he stressed that the Commission itself, not the staff, should assess various recommendations made by the IAC as to the implementation of the JOBS Act and determine how best to respond to them. In his remarks, Commission Aguilar did not comment on the IAC's specific recommendations; his remarks dealt only with the fact that it should be the Commission itself that takes responsibility for review. The IAC, which was established pursuant to Section 911 of Dodd-Frank, had issued a

The SEC approved amendments to the Customer and Industry Codes of Arbitration Procedures (Codes) which direct arbitrators, in most instances, to issue orders (arbitrator orders), instead of issuing subpoenas, when industry parties seek the appearance of witnesses or the production of documents from non-party firms or their employees or associated persons. The amendments add procedures for non-parties to object to subpoenas and for parties and non-parties to object to arbitrator orders of production. The amendments also standardize procedures under the Codes relating to service of motions for

HSBC joined the agreement announced by the Federal Reserve Board and Office of the Comptroller of the Currency ("OCC") to pay $249 million in cash payments to help mortgage borrowers. The sums paid by HSBC include $96 million in direct payments to eligible borrowers and $153 million in other assistance, such as loan modifications and forgiveness of deficiency judgments. Other lenders had previously entered into similar agreements with the bank regulators. View Press Release in full here (links externally to Federal Reserve website).

The ICE rule amendments require Clearing Members to produce electronic audit trail records for Direct Access Members they have authorized to connect to the trading platform. Effective Date: January 18, 2012. View Notice in full here (links externally to ICE website).

The CFTC is extending the time period for which it is reviewing a request from the Chicago Mercantile Exchange Inc. ("CME") for approval of proposed CME Rule 1001 submitted pursuant to CFTC Rule Section 40.5. Essentially, the proposed CME Rule would require that swaps cleared on the CME be reported to the Swap Data Repository ("SDR") maintained by the CME. As we had previously reported, the CFTC would have originally required that the parties to a swap be able to select the SDR to which their data would be reported. This CFTC position had been challenged in court by the CME, and, in order to