All firms, particularly regulated firms, that invest in SEC-registered money market funds should ensure that they have procedures in place to distinguish between funds that have the right to suspend redemptions and funds that do not. Firms that invest in the former may have to take material capital charges or face other regulatory and liquidity issues.

The bottom line of ISDA's analysis is that, (i) despite all of the outcry about too-big-to-fail, regulatory costs weigh most heavily on smaller institutions, whether buy-side or sell-side, and (ii) increasing the costs of entering into derivatives transactions makes hedging more expensive, which increases risk in the economy generally, even if the risk of derivatives specifically is decreased. To put this in practical terms, if a small firm is prevented from hedging with derivatives in a way…

Perhaps these sports games are a bad thing, and perhaps they should be prohibited, but the notion that they are illegal because they are swaps shows how absurd Dodd-Frank's definition of "security-based swap" really is. The breadth of the definition, however, is less of a problem on the securities side (because it only picks up contracts relating to securities) than it is on that of the Commodity Exchange Act, where, in theory, the definition includes a contract relating to any event of…

There is inherent political tension when federal regulators seek to bring enforcement actions against local government officials, particularly if those actions may impair the local governments' ability to get to the capital markets. That tension raises a question: does the SEC have the ability to take action against local elected officials who make overly optimistic statements as to the financial condition of municipal entities?