Twice in the space of a month, the chairman of the House Financial Services Committee has told the Financial Stability Oversight Committee to halt moves to designate non-banks as systemically important financial institutions. Charles Piggott reports.

Banks active in central and eastern Europe believe the adverse scenarios do not reflect reality, but policy-makers are divided on how to respond, says Philip Alexander. Additional reporting by Stefanie Linhardt.

WASHINGTON DC – Commodity Futures Trading Commission (CFTC) acting chairman Mark Wetjen has said the CFTC should reconsider a key advisory notice issued in November last year that extends US swap rules to overseas transactions involving US personnel.

CHARLOTTE, North Carolina – Bank of America said on May 27 that it has resubmitted its capital plan to the Federal Reserve following the bank’s disclosure in late April of a $4bn error in its 2014 Comprehensive Capital Analysis and Review (CCAR). In its Form 8-K filing to the Securities and Exchange Commission, the bank said it has now completed a third-party review of the “processes and controls” regarding reporting and calculation of regulatory capital ratios.

WASHINGTON DC – As part of industry efforts to improve market transparency and investor confidence, the Financial Industry Regulatory Authority (FINRA) has published weekly trading volume data for each alternative trading system (ATS), commonly referred to as ‘dark pools’.

BASEL/MADRID – The Committee on Payment and Settlement Systems (CPSS) and International Organisation of Securities Commissions (Iosco) published the first update of their assessments of how countries are implementing the principles for financial market infrastructures (PFMI). These PFMIs were first produced in 2012, and are designed to “ensure that the infrastructure supporting global financial markets is robust and well placed to withstand financial shocks”.

LONDON/PARIS – As regulations in the US and EU drive market participants to use central counterparties (CCPs) for clearing derivatives, supervisors are waking up to the importance of CCP margining requirements. Three staff from the Bank of England and a member of the French Financial Markets Authority (AMF) scientific advisory board have addressed questions around margining in recent weeks.

LONDON/FRANKFURT – The Bank of England (BoE) and European Central Bank (ECB) have published the second part of their investigation into reviving securitisation markets in Europe, following a shorter analysis produced in April 2014. The new discussion paper, entitled ‘The case for a better functioning securitisation market in the European Union’, is intended to solicit comments by July 4, 2014.

PARIS – The European Securities and Markets Authority (ESMA) has begun the mammoth task of consulting on its own technical standards and on the technical advice it will deliver to the European Commission, both for the implementation of the Markets in Financial Instruments Directive and Regulation (MiFID II and MiFIR). ESMA published a 311-page consultation document on the technical advice, which must be delivered to the commission by December 2014. It also issued a 533-page discussion paper on its own regulatory and implementing technical standards (RTS and ITS), to help shape a further consultation paper that will be issued in late 2014 or early 2015. The closing date for responses to both these initial papers is August 2014.

BRUSSELS – The European Commission has published a first comprehensive review of the financial regulation reform agenda in the EU, taking in new rules for bank capital, financial markets trading, banking union and governance of financial institutions. The commission concluded from available evidence that “the total expected benefits of the financial regulation agenda will outweigh the expected costs, both on a rule-by-rule basis and when considering the reforms as a whole”.