The House Financial Services Committee passed bipartisan bills to amend the derivatives provisions in the Dodd-Frank Act, to require cost-benefit analyses to be done at the SEC, and to require faster implementation of the JOBS Act. The following is a summary of the legislation that the committee passed today including the vote count. H.R. 634 (59-0): The Business Risk Mitigation and Price Stabilization Act of 2013 introduced by Reps. Michael Grimm (R-NY), Gary Peters (D-MI), Austin Scott (R-GA) and Mike McIntyre (D-NY), would exempt end users from the margin and capital requirements of Dodd

Federal Reserve Governor Daniel K. Tarullo gave a speech discussing regulatory efforts to promote financial stability, including efforts to address the "too-big-to-fail" problem and systemic risk generally. Governor Tarullo noted that the existing regulatory response has been extensive, citing ongoing efforts such as the Basel III rulemaking, the Section 165 prudential regulation of large bank holding companies, and the implementation of Title VII of the Dodd-Frank Act as examples. Nevertheless, Governor Tarullo stated that current efforts do not adequately address all of the vulnerabilities

The North American Securities Administrators Association filed an amicus brief supporting FINRA's efforts to overturn a decision by a FINRA hearing panel that allowed Charles Schwab Company to prevent its customers from participating in class-action lawsuits. Similar briefs were filed by the Public Investors Arbitration Bar Association ("PIABA"), and, jointly, by AARP, the National Consumer Law Center and Public Justice in support of FINRA's efforts. Separately, on May 3, 2013, NASAA wrote to SEC Chair Mary Jo White urging her to use the authority granted to the agency in Section 921 of the

The CFTC filed an amended Complaint in its pending enforcement action (see: U.S. Commodity Futures Trading Commission v. William Byrnes, et al.) naming Ron Eibschutz as a Defendant in its ongoing case against the New York Mercantile Exchange, Inc. and two former CME NYMEX employees. The amended Complaint charges CME NYMEX, Byrnes, and Curtin with making repeated disclosures during a two and a half year period of material nonpublic customer information to Eibschutz, an outside commodity broker who was not authorized to receive the information. Eibschutz is charged with aiding and abetting the

FINRA announced that it has fined three firms a total of $900,000 for failing to establish and implement adequate anti-money laundering ("AML") programs and other supervisory systems to detect suspicious transactions. FINRA also fined and suspended four individuals, including two compliance officers. & One firm failed to perform any additional scrutiny of accounts that were related to a prior finding of misconduct. FINRA also found that certain customers' accounts engaged in a pattern of activity consisting of moving millions of dollars through the accounts while conducting minimal to no