Following the adoption of a directive to amend the Settlement Finality and Financial Collateral Arrangements Directives by the European Parliament and Council on May 6, 2009, Member States are required to adopt and publish legislative changes to their national laws by December 30, 2010. In the United Kingdom, HM Treasury issued a consultation paper on its proposed legislative changes in August 2010 and received a number of responses, a summary of which has now been published along with a revised legislative proposal which will be set out to Parliament. Date December 22, 2010

The Financial Services Authority ("FSA") and HM Treasury ("HMT") have published a joint consultation paper setting out proposals for the implementation of the revised UCITS IV Directive. The UCITS IV Directive modernises the regulatory framework and procedures for selling retail investment funds cross-border in Europe. It must be implemented into national law by all EU member States by July 1, 2011. UCITS IV introduces the following changes: a UCITS management company will be allowed to operate a UCITS fund authorised in a different EU Member State, without the need to be established in the

The CFTC announced the appointment of Dr. Andrei Kirilenko as the CFTC's Chief Economist. Dr. Kirilenko has been with the CFTC since 2008. He received his Ph.D. in Economics from the University of Pennsylvania, where he specialized in Finance. His research has focused on the informational properties and the microstructure of financial markets. Prior to joining the CFTC, he spent 12 years at the IMF working on global capital markets issues. Most recently, Dr. Kirilenko has been working on issues related to algorithmic and high frequency trading and played a key role in the review of the unusual

Government bureaucrats are facing an unusual complaint: they are moving too quickly. "We have big staffs, but we are getting inundated and have started getting behind on trying to keep up with this stuff. . . The problem is there's one after another." said Terry Duffy, executive chairman of CME Group. Spencer Bachus and Frank Lucas, Republicans who next year will chair the US House financial services and agriculture committees, respectively, have taken up industry concerns concerning the pace of rulemaking pursuant to Dodd-Frank, writing to regulators to say they may "consider delaying

Directive 2010/73/EU of November 24, 2010, amending Directives 2003/71/EC on the prospectus to be published when securities are offered to the public or admitted to trading and 2004/109/EC on the harmonisation of transparency requirements in relation to information about issuers whose securities are admitted to trading on a regulated market, has been published in the Official Journal of the European Union on December 11, 2010. The Directive, amongst other things, increases the minimum denomination for exempt offerings in the EU from EUR 50,000 to EUR 100,000 (existing offerings are