The CFTC announced that Jeffrey M. Bandman will serve as Acting Director of the Office of International Affairs (OIA). Current OIA Director Sarah E. Josephson will be returning to the Division of Clearing and Risk as Deputy Director. See: CFTC Press Release.

The SEC order approving FINRA-proposed rule amendments to the Code of Arbitration Procedure for Customer and Industry Disputes was published in the Federal Register. The proposed amendment would increase the fee for the late cancellation or postponement of a scheduled hearing. Additionally, the rule change lengthens the notice period for cancelling or postponing a scheduled hearing session from three business days to ten calendar days, and increases the amount of honoraria paid to arbitrators affected by the late cancellation or postponement of a scheduled hearing session from $100 to $600 per

The Office of Financial Research ("OFR") published a working paper which explores statistical commonalities among granular measures of market liquidity with the goal of illuminating system-wide patterns in aggregate liquidity. Lofchie Comment: While the bulk of this paper is too mathematical to be comprehensible to lawyers, there are still bits of it that can be understood by those without mathematical training. Some of the key conclusions are: (i) liquidity is hard to measure; (ii) disappearances of liquidity are sufficiently unusual that they are particularly hard to study; and (iii) when

At SIFMA's 2015 Leaders and Experts Forum, industry leaders provided their perspective on the rest of the year's regulatory and enforcement initiatives for compliance and legal professionals. SIFMA Executive Vice President and General Counsel Ira Hammerman delivered the opening remarks, which highlighted recent and upcoming regulatory and enforcement initiatives. Mr. Hammerman commented on the reproposal by the Department of Labor ("DOL") of its "conflicts of interest" rule. If "done improperly," he said, the rule could hurt investors saving for retirement and "make the process that much more

The NFA announced that its Board of Directors approved a budget of $85 million for FY 2016. The NFA's FY 2016 budget reflects a 7.7 percent increase over its projected FY 2015 operating expenses. According to the NFA, a major portion of the increase is due to the continued expansion of the NFA's swaps regulatory programs and the growth in its technology staffing. S ee: NFA Press Release.