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On October 11, the Securities and Exchange Commission demonstrated renewed interest in completing the regulatory regime for security-based swaps (SBS) by re-opening the comment periods for a number of SBS rules that were previously proposed but never adopted. Specifically, the SEC is requesting further comment on the following proposals:
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2012 capital and margin requirements for security-based swap dealers (SBSDs) that do not have a prudential regulator;
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2012 margin segregation requirements for SBSDs;
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2012 proposal to raise minimum net capital requirements and establish liquidity requirements for broker-dealers permitted to use internal models when computing net capital;
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2013 rules for the cross-border treatment of security-based swap capital, margin and segregation requirements; and
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2014 additional nonbank SBSD capital requirement.
The approval of the extended comment periods was accompanied by some cautionary remarks from Commissioner Kara Stein, “In effect, there are some big changes here, some that we are all seeing for the first time. The nature and extent of the proposed rule text changes appear to me to be more akin to a “re-proposal” than simply the reopening of a comment period.” In fact, the release contains nearly 100 specific questions and requests for comments. Despite this volume of material, the re-opened comment period is only 30 days from the date of publication of the release in the Federal Register, which has not yet occurred.
A fact sheet concerning the SEC proposal is available here.
The full text of the proposal is available here.
