The House Judiciary Subcommittee on Regulatory Reform, Commercial and Antitrust Law held a hearing titled "The Bankruptcy Code and Financial Institution Insolvencies." The hearing focused on examining the current Bankruptcy code and whether it is equipped to address the insolvency of large and small financial institutions. The following witnesses testified: The Honorable Jeffery Lacker, President, Federal Reserve Bank of Richmond (written testimony); Mr. Donald S. Bernstein, Co-Chair of the Insolvency and Restructuring Group, Davis Polk Wardwell LLP (written testimony); and Professor Mark J

Javelin SEF announced that it has amended and limited its "made available to trade" ("MAT") submission with respect to interest rate swaps to the CFTC. A swap that is made available to trade must be traded on a CFTC-regulated futures exchange or swap execution facility. Javelin's original submission, which was criticized for being too broad, initially covered all interest rate swap tenors from one month to 51 years in U.S. dollar, sterling and euro currencies. The updated MAT determination only includes benchmark dollar and euro swaps, along with certain international monetary market ("IMM")

According to an MFA Blog post, the implementation of an EU plan to tax a broad range of financial transactions is likely to be delayed. Under the European Commission's proposal, a 0.1% tax would apply to share and bond trades and 0.01% to derivative transactions between financial institutions, if at least one party is located in the EU. According to the European Commission, the tax, which would impose a levy on stock, bond, and derivative trades, was originally supposed to be implemented on January 1st. However, officials indicated that, without a compromise between the countries that might

The CFTC has announced that it will hold a public meeting on December 10th at 9:30 a.m. to consider "Proprietary Trading and Certain Interests in and Relationships with Covered Funds"; i.e., the Volcker Rule. The Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation and the Board of Governors of the Federal Reserve System have also announced meetings in regard to Volcker. The Office of the Comptroller of the Currency is also expected to adopt final Volcker Rule regulations on December 10th as well. Additionally, the CFTC will consider (i) core principle 9 for designated contract markets ("DCMs") and (ii)

FINRA has filed with the SEC a proposed rule to add a new entrant to the Alternative Display Facility ("ADF"). ADF is a quotation collection and trade reporting facility that provides ADF Market Participants with the ability to post quotations, display orders and report transactions in national market system ("NMS") stocks for submissions to the Securities Information Processor for consolidation and dissemination to vendors and other market participants. Additionally, the ADF delivers real-time data to FINRA for regulatory purposes, including enforcement requirements from the SEC. According to