What Will ELECTION RESULTS mean for Wall Street?

 The election results have obviously given the Republicans a lot more clout. According to the following article, Republicans will have oversight of the agencies whose task is to implement the Dodd-Frank Wall Street Reform and Consumer Protection Act. Also, the House takeover and the GOP's strengthened position in the Senate will also give the party greater influence over the direction and independence of the new Consumer Financial Protection Bureau. Changes are coming!
     . . . June

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Election results: What they mean for Wall Street:
Tradeonlytoday.comPosted on November 03, 2010

The shift of the U.S. House of Representatives to Republican control is expected to give the GOP and Wall Street a fresh opportunity to reshape pending financial regulations.


Republicans will have oversight of the agencies whose task is to implement the Dodd-Frank Wall Street Reform and Consumer Protection Act, The New York Times reports. The Securities and Exchange Commission and the Commodity Futures Trading Commission will be working on more than 240 rules that govern items such as bank capital standards.

The House takeover and the GOP's strengthened position in the Senate will also give the party greater influence over the direction and independence of the new Consumer Financial Protection Bureau.

Republicans say they will use the House Financial Services Committee to ensure that regulators such as the CFTC and the consumer protection bureau do not write rules for the banking industry that lawmakers consider overly restrictive, Bloomberg News reports.

Slower rule making or additional pressure on regulators could benefit companies such as Goldman Sachs Group Inc., JPMorgan Chase & Co. and Bank of America Corp., which lobbied against parts of the Dodd-Frank law and predicted it would hurt their financial results.

Democrats still control the Senate, and Republicans are unlikely to be able to fundamentally reshape or repeal the Dodd-Frank law or unwind the government's role in housing finance. But the Republican approach will mark a shift from Democratic policies.

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Dodd-Frank: Gray Areas In Commodities Futures Trading?

 There are still some very gray areas about what the Dodd-Frank Wall Street Reform Bill requires with reference to Commodities Futures Trading. According to the following article, the Commissioners voted to immediately begin requirements for daily reporting of swaps about a certain threshold by exchanges and market participants to determine position limits. It may still be some time before those limits can be put in place.
     . . . June


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Dodd-Frank: What's An Energy Trader to Do?
Industry Verticals:  Jill Feblowitz 01.11.2010 kl 17:40 | IDC Energy Industry Insights Community


Ever since the signing of the Dodd-Frank Wall Street Reform and Consumer Protection Act in July, the Commodity Futures Trading Commission (CFTC) has been working on building out the detailed regulations mandated by the bill. Recently, there have been two interesting developments in putting together regulations that energy companies will want to take note of in order to determine what to do next.

According to a Reuters article by Roberta Rampton and Christopher Doering on October 19, since this is the first time that the CFTC will be regulating the over the counter derivatives market, final regulations on position limits might be delayed until the CFTC has enough information to inform what those position limits may be; the initial deadline was January 2011.

To get that information, the Commissioners voted to immediately begin requirements for daily reporting of swaps about a certain threshold by exchanges and market participants. It is fairly clear that this reporting will not apply to commercial end users that want to hedge, but it may not rule out energy companies that are doing large volumes of swaps. So at this point, final position limits regulation may be delayed for a while.

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Could All Money Transfers Face Anti-terrorism Scrutiny?

The Obama administration wants to require U.S. banks to report all electronic money transfers into and out of the country.It gets to the point where maybe it's all too much. Does it mean that if you're making a money transfer to a family member they will scrutinize it? Is it really necessary to put everyone under the microscope in order to possibly ferret out a few bad guys? Won't they just find a way around the rules? They always do
   . .. . .  June

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Money transfers could face anti-terrorism scrutiny:

The Obama administration wants to require U.S. banks to report all electronic money transfers into and out of the country, a dramatic expansion in efforts to counter terrorist financing and money laundering.

Officials say the information would help them spot the sort of transfers that helped finance the al-Qaeda hijackers who carried out the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks. They say the expanded financial data would allow anti-terrorist agencies to better understand normal money-flow patterns so they can spot abnormal activity.

Financial institutions are now required to report to the Treasury Department transactions in excess of $10,000 and others they deem suspicious. The new rule would require banks to disclose even the smallest transfers.

Treasury officials plan to post the proposed regulation on their Web site Monday and in the Federal Register this week. The public could comment before a final rule is published and the plan takes effect, which officials say will probably not be until 2012.

The proposal is a long-delayed response to the 2004 Intelligence Reform and Terrorism Prevention Act, which specified reforms to better organize the intelligence community and to avoid a repeat of the 20S01 attacks. The law required that the Treasury secretary issue regulations requiring financial institutions to report cross-border transfers if deemed necessary to combat terrorist financing.

"By establishing a centralized database, this regulatory plan will greatly assist law enforcement in detecting and ferreting out transnational organized crime, multinational drug cartels, terrorist financing and international tax evasion," said James H. Freis Jr., director of Treasury's Financial Crimes Enforcement Network (FinCEN).


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