AFR Comment Letter: On Forward Contracts With Embedded Volumetric Optionality
Download the letter here.
Tag Archives: Derivatives
AFR in the News: Main Street Banks Play the Wall Street Lobbying Game (Pittsburgh Post-Gazette)
“PNC, the nation’s 10th largest bank, hasn’t spent the past few years just building itself into a financial behemoth. Like many other banks, it’s built up political capital too. And last year, it spent some of that currency to help roll back a regulation [that] barred banks with federally insured deposits from engaging in certain potentially high-risk financial transactions… Swaps have legitimate uses, but ‘when things go wrong in this area, they go very very wrong,’ said Marcus Stanley [of] Americans for Financial Reform.”
AFR in the News: Massive Bill’s Reform Deficit (Scranton Times)
“[As] part of a $1.1 trillion compromise to continue running the government that Congress passed over the weekend, [a] crucial Dodd-Frank reform effectively was repealed. Big investment banks once again will be able to use federally insured deposits and other public protections to throw the dice on lightly regulated derivatives — private profit, public risk.. [I]n Washington, money not only talks, it writes the law.”
AFR in the News: Critics Say Spending Bill Includes a Bonanza for Wall Street (NBC TV)
Marcus Stanley, policy director for Americans for Financial Reform, which advocates for tighter regulation of Wall Street, said the big winners would be three large banks — Citigroup, JPMorgan Chase and Bank of America. “These derivatives markets are very lucrative,” Stanley said in an interview Friday. “And that safety net subsidy, that deposit insurance subsidy, gives you a very large advantage. There’s a lot of money involved in this.”
Press Briefing: Senator Jeff Merkley Joins Barney Frank and Public-Interest Advocates in Decrying Dodd-Frank Rollback Threat
In a telephone press briefing, Senator Jeff Merkley (D-OR) and former Representative Barney Frank, co-author of the landmark 2010 financial reform law, outlined the dangers of a House spending-bill provision that would repeal an important piece of the Dodd-Frank Act. They were joined by Damon A. Silvers, director of policy and special counsel for the AFL-CIO; Nancy Zirkin, executive vice president of The Leadership Conference on Civil and Human Rights; and Lisa Donner, executive director of Americans for Financial Reform.
Joint Statement: Budget Deal Must Not Include an Outrageous Wall Street Giveaway
“The section of Dodd-Frank that Congress is proposing to repeal was put in place to help prevent future bailouts of too big to fail banks. It cordons off the kinds of extraordinarily risky transactions that were at the heart of the financial crisis. Including this repeal in the budget is outrageous. It’s a giveaway to a tiny handful of the biggest Wall Street banks that puts the country’s financial and economic stability at risk.”
AFR Letter: Mandatory Margin Requirements Needed for Uncleared Swaps
“Mandatory margin requires participants in the swaps market to take full account of the risks of their derivatives transactions and provide some level of advance provisioning for such risks. The availability of properly segregated margin is clearly of enormous value in case of the default of a swaps counterparty.”
AFR Letter: CFTC and SEC Must Act Against Derivatives “De-Guaranteeing” Ploy
“On behalf of Americans for Financial Reform (AFR), we write today to ask you to ensure appropriate regulatory oversight of derivatives transactions conducted through foreign subsidiaries of multinational Wall Street banks. In particular, we urge you to prevent the inappropriate classification of such derivatives as ‘non-guaranteed’ by the parent company, a classification which could exempt them from numerous critical derivatives regulations.”
AFR in the News: Court Ruling Strengthens Swap Rules Overseas (Bloomberg)
“Marcus Stanley, policy director for Americans for Financial Reform, a coalition including the AFL-CIO labor federation, said the decision should bolster the agency’s efforts to curb recent steps by Wall Street to escape Dodd-Frank by shifting their overseas trading operations. ‘I really hope that this decision is going to stiffen the CFTC’s backbone,’ Stanley said in a phone interview.”
AFR in the News: Wall Street Defends Overseas Swap Trading From U.S. Regulation
““We had been warning for years about this loophole in the CFTC’s cross-border guidance,” Marcus Stanley, policy director for American for Financial Reform, told Bloomberg’s Silla Brush. “Now the CFTC seems to be letting it become an exit-ramp from Dodd-Frank.”