The CFTC announced today that LMC Asset Management violated new Forex registration procedures stemming from the Dodd Frank Act. The result of the violation was a cease and desist order of all trading activity until a $140,000 civil penalty is paid. LMC exercised discretionary trading authority over accounts of individuals that were not eligible contract participants. View press release in full here(links externally to CFTC website).

The CFTC is adopting final regulations to implement the exception to the clearing requirement available to swap counterparties meeting certain conditions under Section 2(h)(7) of the Commodity Exchange Act, as amended by the Dodd-Frank Act. (There is attached the Federal Register version of the rule.) Firms that are implementing Title VII compliance procedures should update them to take account of the final version of the clearing exception. Effective Date: September 17, 2012 (Note that the effective date will not be meaningful but will depend on when other rules and requirements come into

The SEC is adopting Rule 613 under the Exchange Act to require national securities exchanges and national securities associations (“self-regulatory organizations” or “SROs”) to submit a national market system (“NMS”) plan to create, implement, and maintain a consolidated order tracking system, or consolidated audit trail, with respect to the trading of NMS securities, that would capture customer and order event information for orders in NMS securities, across all markets, from the time of order inception through routing, cancellation, modification, or execution. The proposed version of Rule

With foreclosures rising, reports surfaced of instances in which financial institutions failed to comply with SCRA. the GAO examined the (1) eligibility for SCRA protections and extent of SCRA mortgage-related violations by depository institutions, (2) SCRA compliance oversight by prudential regulators and other federal agencies, and (3) the military services’ efforts to educate servicemembers on SCRA. The GAO collected data on populations eligible for SCRA from DOD and SCRA violations from banking and law enforcement agencies and reviewed a stratified random sample of prudential regulators’

The SEC has charged the U.S. investment banking subsidiary of Japan-based Mizuho Financial Group and three former employees with misleading investors in a collateralized debt obligation (CDO) by using "dummy assets" to inflate the deal's credit ratings. The SEC also charged the firm that served as the deal's collateral manager and the person who was its portfolio manager. (This enforcement action is related to the Delaware Asset Advisers enforcement action that also appears in today's news.) View release in full here (links externally to SEC website).