The Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) filed a civil lawsuit against Archegos Capital Management, its founder, and several other individuals in April 2022. The SEC alleges that Archegos engaged in a fraudulent scheme to manipulate the market for the securities of the issuers that represented Archegos's top 10 holdings, both through purchases of the issuers' securities and entry into total return swaps referencing those issuers. This event has led investment firms on both the buy and sell sides to reconsider how they manage counterparty and market risks and how they will structure their future securities financing and liquidity management strategies.

On March 6, 2016, the Basel Committee on Banking Supervision (BIS) published a consultation paper proposing to amend or “calibrate” the Basel III non-risk-based leverage ratio. Banks have been lobbying the Committee quite aggressively to make changes to the way the leverage ratio leverage ratio is calculated to alter the ratio’s overly rigid approach, which they say ignores or fails to take into account the way banks handle transactions in derivatives in practice.  This consultation proposes some softening of the rules by which banks that trade large numbers of financial derivatives calculate their leverage ratios.  In addition, the consultation seeks comment on potentially raising the leverage ratio limit above 3% for certain global systemically important banks (G-SIBS) like Goldman Sachs, Societe Generale, Morgan Stanley and HSBC, while leaving it the same for other banks.  

As a companion to the SEC’s recent proposed rules on the use of derivatives by registered investment companies, the SEC’s Office of Risk Analysis has published a white paper studying just how funds use derivatives.  Based on data from Forms N-CSR and N-SAR supplemented with information from Morningstar, the study’s authors assembled data on derivatives positions held by 10 percent of funds registered in 2014.  Because section 18 of the Investment Company Act restricts the ability of a fund to issue “senior securities,” the study focuses on those derivatives (and certain financial commitment transactions) that implicate section 18. These kinds of derivative positions can potentially present “senior security” issues because a fund that enters into these transactions is or may be required to make a payment or deliver cash or other assets during the life of the instrument or at maturity or early termination.