If ever a finding came under the heading of "as surely as the sun rises in the east," it is that Dodd-Frank has increased regulatory costs. That said, based on the structure of this report, for reasons that were not the intentions of the GAO, the costs of Dodd-Frank are significantly understated. As a starting matter, the report deals with the costs imposed only on a very small subset of financial institutions. Secondly, the report covers only those rules whose costs to the economy are…

The implicit message of the staff's letter is that the staff (not surprisingly) prefers electronic filings. One question that this raises (not actually directly related to this letter) is whether the SEC should as a rule allow electronic delivery by broker-dealers of all documents to customers (and not just to regulators). As this letter points out, electronic delivery is in fact faster and more certain. The existing regulatory preference for paper delivery of documents to customers (absent…

The need for this change in the documentation of contracts is driven by the fact that the banking regulators previously took a fundamentally punitive and economically unsound position with respect to the regulatory capital treatment of collateral for cleared derivatives. As the banking regulators stretch their regulatory authority into new types of transactions (e.g., cleared derivatives), the limits of their pre-existing regulatory expertise become clear.

Recently, the banking…

Given the resource limitations under the 2016 budget (see CFTC Chair Massad Criticizes Budget Deal (with Lofchie Comment)), the CFTC should conserve regulatory resources by ceasing to grant time-limited no-action relief from unnecessary rule requirements. It would be simpler to grant indefinite relief under the conditions specified in the letter, which seem sufficient to permit the CFTC to achieve its regulatory goals. By providing two years of relief to SEFs…