It is not clear what specific measures New York financial institutions should take to comply with Superintendent Lacewell's statement.

The NYDFS letter cites a study concluding that "single and multi-family residential homes with 34 billion of reconstruction value are at high risk of storm surges." In the context of the letter, which requires regulated organizations to take account of various risks that include market risk arising from climate change, the Superintendent seems to…

Rather than the SEC and CFTC reining in their staffs, they ought to be giving their staffs more authority to grant no-action relief. See .

The interpretive release that Rule 18f-4 replaces is more than forty years old. As swaps developed and the use of listed futures increased over that time, it has become obvious that the original interpretive release treated similar transactions very differently, and produced economically irrational results.

The lesson to be learned is not…

Chair Tarbert's guidance follows closely on the issuance of a statement by the . Notwithstanding this unusual agreement across the political divide, it is exactly the wrong way to go. The SEC and the CFTC have authority over vast swaths of the U.S. economy. It is extremely difficult and time-consuming to get the Staff to say "yes" to almost any question, even where yes is the right policy answer. If every meaningful question must go up for Commission action, whether at the SEC or the CFTC,…

It is interesting that the SEC thought to bring this action as a "swaps" case. It would have been more straightforward, and ordinary, to charge the firm with acting as an unregistered broker-dealer and making illegal margin loans. Calling this a swaps case suggests that the conduct in question would have been legal but for the expansion of the SEC's authority under Dodd-Frank; that is not the case. This is not the first time the SEC Enforcement Staff turned an ordinary securities enforcement…