The federal banking regulatory agencies announced the availability of a regulatory capital estimation tool to help community banking organizations and other interested parties evaluate recently published regulatory capital proposals. The tool will assist these organizations in estimating the potential effects on their capital ratios of the agencies' Basel III Notice of Proposed Rulemaking (NPR) and Standardized Approach NPR. The Basel III NPR focuses primarily on strengthening the level of regulatory capital requirements and improving the quality of capital. The Standardized Approach NPR

The CFTC ordered Citigroup Inc. and Citigroup Global Markets Ltd. to pay a $525,000 penalty for violating position limits on wheat. View release in full here (links externally to CFTC site).

The CFTC is revising a system of records under the Privacy Act of 1974, CFTC–15, Large Trader Report Files (Integrated Surveillance System), and renaming the system ‘‘Enterprise Surveillance, Oversight Risk Monitoring System’’ to be more descriptive of its contents and enhancements. Comments Due: October 24, 2012. This action will be effective without further notice on November 5, 2012, unless revised pursuant to comments received. View release here(links externally to CFTC website).

The SEC approved amendments to MSRB Rule G-34 concerning the use of the terms in communications about new issues of municipal securities. The amendments will prohibit any broker, dealer or municipal securities dealer (a "dealer") from using the term "not reoffered" or other comparable term or designation, such as the commonly used designation of "NRO," without also including the applicable price or yield information about the securities in any of its written communications, electronic or otherwise, sent by or on behalf of the dealer. The rule change will be effective as of November 1, 2012 for

FINRA announced that it has censured and fined Merrill Lynch $500,000 for supervisory failures that allowed deficiencies in filing required reports. The reports included those regarding customer complaints, arbitration claims and related U4 and U5 filings. View news release in full here(links externally to FINRA website).