Chair Massad's decision to delay the de minimis threshold is welcome. It means that the CFTC intends to avoid issuing a formal exemption at the last possible minute. Despite the data limitations of the study, the results seem unambiguous: dropping the registration threshold from $8 billion to $3 billion now would have caused small swap dealers to either (i) decrease their dealing activity even more than they have, or (ii) drop out of the market entirely, which in turn would…

The government maintains that the SEC program granting awards to whistleblowers provides great enforcement benefits. Perhaps legislation mandating the creation of similar programs should be adopted to provide whistleblower awards to those who report misconduct by the government. Balanced whistleblowing seems particularly apposite now that the range of government activity is expanding to encompass tasks that historically were carried out by the private sector.

The OCC's focus on business model sustainability seems especially interesting in light of recent reductions in the number of smaller banks. Might we see regulatory pressures force struggling banks to sell themselves off or shut down?

The report contains numerous charts and exhibits based on statistics from an incomplete data set - an upfront admission by the NASAA Enforcement Section Chair. So it is difficult to say how much of the report reflects actual trends or types of violations in the securities industry. As a result, the report comes across as a kind of an advertisement for NASAA and state securities regulators. If any single area of the report should attract firms' attention, it is probably "Senior Fraud" –…