The Federal Reserve announced administrative actions involving Standard Chartered Bank relating to anti-money laundering and Bank Secrecy Act compliance. In addition, the U.S. Department of Justice, the District Attorney for New York County, and the Treasury Department's Office of Foreign Assets Control announced separate agreements with Standard Chartered relating to the same matter. See: Federal Reserve Press Release; Treasury Press Release. See also: Cease and Desist Order.

Samara Cohen, the Managing Director in the Securities Division of Goldman, Sachs Co., gave her views on the House of Financial Services Committee's ongoing implementation of the Dodd-Frank Act, especially on extraterritoriality concerns with respect to Title VII regulation and implementation. In her introductory remarks, she said: [The CFTC's current] guidance fails to provide a clear implementation sequencing scheme that accords with the work being done to implement the G-20 commitments by regulators and legislators in other jurisdictions. These problems will discourage customers from

The SEC is releasing an exemptive order from the "locate," short sale price test, and close-out requirements of regulation SHO for sales of vault securities. In the aftermath of Hurricane Sandy, the Depository Trust Clearing Corporation (DTCC) reported significant damage throughout DTCC's vault. As a result, physical certificates have been considered inaccessible. Sales of owned securities, whose settlement is dependent on the delivery of such physical certificates, may experience settlement delays as a result of the inaccessibility of the physical certificates. These delays have implications

SIFMA submitted a letter to the CFTC requesting the Commission to provide interpretive guidance and other appropriate relief with the result that insurance-linked securities (ILS) transactions will not be regulated as commodity pools under the Commodity Exchange Act by Title VII of the Dodd-Frank Act. The request for relief extends to those ILS transactions that do not satisfy the non-exclusive safe harbor for certain insurance transactions not being a swap as a result of (i) the cedant's primary regulator being outside the U.S. and consequently failing to meet the "Provider" test and/or (ii)

A federal district court in Washington rejected arguments by the U.S. Chamber of Commerce and the Investment Company Institute that a CFTC rule requiring mutual funds with commodity investments to register with the agency is unnecessary, and that the CFTC didn't properly assess the costs and benefits when it approved the regulation in February. "The court is satisfied that the CFTC considered the relevant factors, acted well within its discretion, and that there was nothing arbitrary or capricious about the CFTC's actions in promulgating the final rule," Judge Beryl Howell wrote in the