CFTC today announced that staff will hold a public roundtable on Thursday, August 9, 2012, from 9:30 a.m. to 5:00 p.m., to discuss customer protection requirements for futures commission merchants (FCMs). The objective of the roundtable is to gather public input on a variety of ideas to further protect customers. [SL Comment: This obviously takes place against the background of MF Global and Peregrine. What the CFTC would seem to want to achieve out of this roundtable is to build up newspaper momentum for insurance funding and for increased regulatory funding. In fact, many of the recent CFTC

The Federal Reserve Board is publishing a final rule, Regulation HH, Designated Financial Market Utilities. (We had published the pre-Fed. Reg. version of this rule on July 31.] This rule implements provisions of Sections 805(a) and 806(e) of the Dodd-Frank Act, including risk-management standards for financial market utilities ("FMUs") that are designated as systemically important by the Financial Stability Oversight Council and standards for determining when a designated FMU is required to provide advance notice of proposed changes to its rules, procedures or operations that could materially

At yesterday's House Financial Services Subcommittee Markup, members approved H.R. 2827, introduced by Rep. Robert Dold (R-Ill.), by a vote of 20 to 10 with 1 present. The bill aims to clarify the definition of "municipal advisor" Additionally, the bill seeks to introduce exemptions to the municipal advisor definition. The definition of "municipal advisor" is in Section 15B(e)(4) of the Exchange Act. The revised definition narrows the definition and makes the definition less ambiguous by requiring that such entity be "formally engaged, in writing and for compensation" by a municipal entity

The OCC today released a list of Community Reinvestment Act (CRA) performance evaluations that became public during the period of July 1, 2012 through July 31, 2012. The list contains only national banks, federal savings associations, and insured federal branches of foreign banks that have received ratings. View in full here (links externally to OCC website).

The SEC announced that municipal securities expert John J. Cross III has been named the director of the agency's new Office of Municipal Securities. [SL Comment: What is perhaps more interesting is the amount of publicity being given to municipal securities these days. For example, the SEC has devoted a page of its website to issues involving municipalities. SEC Commissioner Walter is taking the lead on this initiative and many of the items of the web page feature her activities. View press release in full here (links externally to SEC website).