Change Overview and Rationale
On November 5, 2013, the Financial Stability Board (FSB) launched the second stage of its two-stage quantitative impact study on the proposed regulatory framework for securities financing transactions. As you may recall, on August 29, 2013, the FSB published the results of the first stage of its look into securities finance.
R]eforms of domestic banking are far from sufficient for a global hub like London. Now is the time for a greater focus on what’s needed for resilient international banking and robust global markets.
Is collateralized commercial paper (CCP) the the new “killer app” for liquidity? Finadium, a leading specialist research and advisory firm in the securities and investments industry, has published a a research report, “Collateralized Commercial Paper: Regulatory Arbitrage or Elegant Solution?” exploring whether innovative forms of CCP may at least in the short term take the place of repo.
The Office of the Comptroller of the Currency (OCC) and Board of Governors of the Federal Reserve System (Fed) published final rules in the Federal Register on October 11, 2013 revising risk-based and leverage capital requirements for banking organizations and replacing existing interim rules.
The Bank for International Settlements (BIS) and the International Organization of Securities Commissions (IOSCO) have published their final framework for margin requirements for non-centrally cleared derivatives. The document sets forth globally agreed standards for all financial firms and systemically important non-financial entities that engage in non-centrally cleared derivatives.
In his paper published August 28, 2013, Yesha Yadav of Vanderbilt Law School posits that the rise of derivatives like credit default swaps (CDS) has made the concept of insider trading inoperable in markets where these derivatives trade. Yadav’s paper, “Insider Trading in the Derivatives Market (and What it Means for Everyone Else),” asserts that the credit derivatives markets actually may be more efficient by factoring in insider knowledge and transmitting this information more freely.
According to Yadav, the operation of the CDS market changes the assumption that shareholders lose when insiders trade using non-public information.
Prior to Dodd-Frank, the CDS market lived outside the insider trading rules, and the credit derivative market has operated using insider knowledge almost freely. New rules, however, expand the reach of the insider trading prohibition explicitly including the credit derivatives market.
“The purpose of the [full-allotment overnight reverse repo] facility is to establish a floor on money market rates and to improve the implementation of monetary policy even when the balance sheet is large. Even if our balance sheet increases significantly further and stays very large for many years, it will be useful to have this facility available to improve monetary policy control.”
On August 29, 2013, the Financial Stability Board (FSB) issued its finalized policy framework for its securities lending and repo workstream. As part of a larger examination of shadow banking, the FSB focused on five specific areas in which policies are needed to mitigate the potential systemic risks associated with shadow banking, with one of these five areas being securities lending and repo. Following up on their November 2012 consultation paper, the FSB has issued its final Policy Framework for Addressing Shadow Banking Risks in Securities Lending and Repos. This document sets out recommendations for addressing financial stability risks in this area, including enhanced transparency, regulation of securities financing, and improvements to market structure. It also includes consultative proposals on minimum standards for methodologies to calculate haircuts on noncentrally cleared securities financing transactions and a framework of numerical haircut floors.
In an effort to combat the pro-cyclicality caused by changes in repo and securities lending haircuts during a crisis, the Financial Stability Board has proposed to introduce minimum standards for the calculation of haircuts. In the belief that higher haircuts would curb the procyclical effect of risky assets and curtail the build-up of excessive leverage, they are also considering putting a floor under haircut calculations.
In a globally interconnected marketplace, just how effective can country-by-country regulation really be? According to David Wright, Secretary General of IOSCO, this fragmented regulation from jurisdiction to jurisdiction may be doing more harm than good. The tools currently being used to coordinate financial regulation internationally are too soft, Wright says.