Law and regulation

After a week of fierce wrangling, the House and Senate reach a shaky compromise over fiduciary bill.

After a marathon final day of debate, the regulatory reform process ended in the early hours of Friday in the same dramatic manner it had been conducted for more than a year: with a near breakdown followed eventually by a miraculous save.

While several critical regulatory reform issues remained in limbo late Wednesday, House and Senate conferees agreed to several key provisions, including one allowing banks to pay interest on business checking accounts.

House and Senate conferees are expected Thursday to add language to the final regulatory reform bill that would strengthen a provision to ban proprietary trading and restrict investment in private-equity firms and hedge funds.

House and Senate conferees were set Tuesday to deal national banks a setback, agreeing on final language that would make it harder for federal regulators to preempt state consumer protection laws.

FINRA has struck an agreement with the Australian Securities and Investments Commission to enhance the work efforts between the two regulators.

Spectrem Group’s latest report finds many investors are satisfied with advisory firms’ communications regarding fees and variable products.

The Securities and Exchange Commission has launched a review of a failed investment by five southeastern Wisconsin school districts in collateralized debt obligations that were intended to establish trusts to pay the districts’ non-pension retiree health care benefits.

The Securities and Exchange Commission said Monday it charged ICP Asset Management LLC and its founder and president, Thomas Priore, with defrauding investors four multi-billion-dollar collateralized debt obligations

House conferees reached an accord with Sen. Richard Durbin on a provision of the regulatory reform bill that would allow the Fed to regulate interchange fees on debit cards.

Now that custodians like Schwab Advisor Services will have to report the same information directly to the Internal Revenue Service, Schwab is taking steps to ensure that they and their advisor clients move in lock step with each other to avoid running afoul of the IRS’s new rules.

The Senate is considering a set of exemptions to the Volcker Rule that would allow the asset management divisions of banks to continue business as usual when it comes to investing client money in hedge funds and private equity.

A two-year extension to the Build America Bonds program, as well as extensions to a handful of other bond provisions set to expire at the end of the year, remain in legislative limbo as Senate Democratic leaders this week continue attempts to produce a tax bill that they can pass.

The conference committee made critical changes to the regulatory reform bill in its first substantive week of work, but the hardest decisions are still ahead.

House and Senate conferees meeting to hammer out a financial regulatory reform bill appear to have reached an agreement that would allow the Municipal Securities Rulemaking Board to regulate financial advisers and other market intermediaries.

Neither criminal prosecutors nor the SEC ever filed charges against AIG or any executives.

The House approved a bill 241 to 182 on Thursday that would create a $30 billion fund that community banks could access for small business loans.

After a heated debate, the regulatory reform conference committee agreed late Thursday to scale back a provision of the bill that would eliminate the use of trust-preferred securities as Tier 1 capital.

The Securities and Exchange Commission is stepping up its enforcement efforts in the municipal securities market for the first time in more than a decade, with a staff of roughly 30 attorneys charged with investigating and trying muni and public pension fund cases.

The Securities and Exchange Commission Wednesday accused the former owner of Taylor Bean & Whitaker with orchestrating a massive equity and MBS fraud tied to his firm's warehouse borrowings from Colonial Bank, a depository it tried to take control of last summer using Troubled Asset Relief Program (TARP) money.