The MSRB published a report on secondary market trading in the municipal securities market. The report, authored by Eric Sirri, former head of the SEC's Division of Trading and Markets, focuses on pricing in secondary market transactions in municipal securities. The report is intended to provide a baseline set of statistics about municipal bond trading. It describes the overall effect on pricing patterns related to the movement of municipal bonds through the marketplace by examining pricing differentials between two consecutive (or paired) trades in a security, and when a security is sold by

CFTC Commissioner O'Malia delivered the keynote address at the Quadrilateral Meeting of European and American financial regulators and lawyers. He focused on what he viewed as the problems created by CFTC rulemaking during the tenure of Chairman Gensler. Commissioner O'Malia asserted that the fundamental principle for reform is that "regulators must do no harm." He expressed his concern over continuing reports of market fragmentation and the fracturing of liquidity between U.S. and non-U.S. markets as a result of diverging regulatory approaches to the implementation of the G20 principles. In

FINRA's proposed rule amendments relating to quotation requirements for unlisted equity securities, and the deletion of the rules related to the OTC bulletin board service, were published in the Federal Register. The proposed rule change would, among other things, delete the FINRA Rule 6500 Series, which governs the operation of the OTC Bulletin Board ("OTCBB") service, and cease operation of the OTCBB. FINRA would continue to centralize last-sale transaction reporting through the FINRA OTC Reporting Facility ("ORF") and, therefore, continue to operate a system that collects and disseminates

O n July 7, 2014, just days before the SEC's first-ever FCPA trial was to begin, the parties announced a settlement that closed one of the remaining chapters of the Panalpina-related cases brought by the SEC and DOJ. The resolution, which has been characterized in the media as a defeat for the government, ended a case filed by the SEC against Mark A. Jackson (former Noble Corp. CEO) and James J. Ruehlen (former director of Noble's subsidiary in Nigeria, and current head of Noble's operations in Mexico). No fines or administrative penalties were imposed beyond the defendants' consent to

Amendments correcting the final regulations published by the CFTC on April 3, 2012, which imposed certain requirements on swap dealers and major swap participants regarding risk management programs, were published in the Federal Register. According to the CFTC, the final regulations as originally published contained errors that proved to be misleading and had to be corrected. Specifically, the new corrections deal with CFTC Rule 23.600 ("Risk Management Program for Swap Dealers and Major Swap Participants"). The corrected language appears below. The only change from the original language is