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Receiving Wide Coverage ...Holiday Reading: The long-simmering battle between five federal agencies over the Volcker Rule appears to be in its final stage. The current draft is around 1,000 pages, and it's expected to be finalized before the end of the year. The basic dynamics here with the Fed and the SEC pushing for looser restrictions, while the CFTC seeks tighter rules are old news. But the New York Times has a detailed look at some of the places where the agencies remain at odds, including the draft language defining market-making. The Times also reports: "Since the Volcker Rule was first proposed in 2011, regulators have had to contend with a fierce lobbying campaign by the banks. But that effort lost momentum last year, after JPMorgan's trading debacle revealed that its traders were placing enormous speculative bets under the guise of hedging." Meanwhile, the Financial Times reports that the Fed is considering giving banks until July 2015 to comply with Volcker's new restrictions.
November 18 -
SEC Chairwoman Mary Jo White said Tuesday that regulators could "maybe" finalize the much-delayed ban on proprietary trading by the expected year-end delivery date. But she refused to commit to the deadline and warned that the rule's "complexities make it difficult" to finalize.
November 12
PHILADELPHIA Federal Reserve official Charles Plosser on Monday became the latest regulator to warn that the government may not finalize the Volcker rule by the end of this year.
"Oh boy... I don't know that we'll get there by the end of the year," Plosser, the president of the Philadelphia Fed, told reporters after a speech on Monday.
Three years after it was enacted, regulators are hurtling towards an unofficial year-end deadline to finalize the Volcker rule, a provision of the Dodd-Frank financial reform law that would ban proprietary trading and restrict bank investments in hedge funds. Treasury Secretary Jack Lew has exhorted the five regulatory agencies in charge of approving the
But in recent weeks, officials have started to indicate that they will blow that deadline. Last week, Securities and Exchange Commission Chairwoman Mary Jo White
Plosser had even fewer assurances on Monday.
"The regulators that means all of us, all the people involved - would like to get this done and move on, but as you well know it's turned out to be a lot more difficult than a lot of people have anticipated," he said during a question-and-answer session at a risk-management conference.
A lot of regulators and financial industry members "tried to signal that implementing the Volcker rule was going to be a lot more difficult than writing the legislation," he added. "The devil is in the details in a lot of respects, and I think we've discovered just how much detail there is to this."
When asked to identify the biggest stumbling block to finalizing the rule, Plosser demurred, but said problems have arisen from all sides. "It's everything from market-making, to... in many cases it's definition -- what do you define as proprietary trading?... That's where the biggest headaches are."
Despite the fact that a finalized Volcker rule does not quite exist, banks are currently expected to comply with it by July. The Fed is now considering extending that deadline by a year, according to the
Plosser confirmed that "there's a chance" of such an extension for banks, though "that will probably not make Congress happy."
He spoke to reporters after a speech at the Risk Management Association's annual conference in downtown Philadelphia.
