Insights

Patomak CEO’s Take on the Treasury Capital Markets Report: a Positive Step Toward Reform, Some Weaknesses Still Need to be Addressed

Today, Patomak Global Partners CEO Paul Atkins released a review of the Department of Treasury’s recently-released report on capital markets regulation. After eight years of anemic economic growth, due largely to increased barriers to small business financing and accelerating regulatory complexity, Treasury’s report sets forth a pragmatic approach to improving capital formation, expanding investor choice, and simplifying regulations. The report was issued in response to a February Executive Order that requires Treasury to identify policies that could advance, or conflict with, the President’s “Core Principles” on financial regulation. These Principles include making regulation efficient, empowering American investors, ending taxpayer-funded bailouts, and improving the regulatory process.  

Overall, the Report should give investors, consumers, workers, small businesses, and the financial industry alike reason for optimism. Its recommendations on expanding access to capital, securitization, and regulatory processes, Atkins writes, neatly align with the President’s objectives. The report’s recommendations on derivatives and equity market structure also largely go in the right direction.

Atkins notes, however, that the report’s section on so-called financial market utilities accepts failed regulatory approaches that are antithetical to the Core Principles. He also writes that some of the report’s recommendations related to derivatives and equity market structure are weak or misguided.

Moving forward, Atkins encourages Treasury to embrace needed reforms to financial market policies that conflict with the President’s Core Principles in its future reports on asset management, insurance, the Financial Stability Oversight Council, and OLA. Treasury should announce that it will drop its ongoing appeal of the strong March 2016 MetLife v. FSOC court ruling that limits one of FSOC’s sweeping powers to designate firms “systemically important” – an anti-competitive and costly “too-big-to-fail” label that brings about moral hazard and adds next to nothing to make the financial system more “stable.” Treasury should also endorse Congress’s effort to rein in FSOC’s full suite of designation powers and end taxpayer-funded OLA bailouts.

Click through to read the full analysis.

Forbes: Token Alliance Launches To Promote Best Practices For ICOs

Forbes reporter Laura Shin writes:

Monday, the Chamber of Digital Commerce, a trade association for the digital asset and blockchain industry, launches the Token Alliance, which aims to educate, promote and shape the world of crypto assets and token sales.

Its co-chairs have backgrounds that will be of great interest to token issuers: Dr. Jim Newsome, the former Chairman of the Commodity Futures Trading Commission, and Paul Atkins, a former Securities and Exchange Commissioner.

WSJ: Ex-SEC Official Picked to Monitor Deutsche Bank’s Derivatives Overhaul

Wall Street Journal reporter Telis Demos writes:

A former Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) official has been appointed to monitor an overhaul of Deutsche Bank AG's systems for reporting trades in its giant derivatives book. 

Paul Atkins was named to the role by a federal judge on Thursday, following a request by the Commodity Futures Trading Commission. Last year, that agency fined Deutsche Bank $2.5 million for failing to make timely and accurate reports of derivatives trades known as swaps. 

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By: Patomak Global Partners

Former SEC Commissioner Dan Gallagher Joins Patomak Global Partners as President

Washington, D.C. - Patomak Global Parnters, a leading consulting firm to international and domestic corporations and financial services firms that provides strategic risk management and regulatory compliance services, corporate governance advice, and enforcement and litigation support, announced that today former U.S. Securities and Exchange Commissioner Dan Gallagher has joined the firm as President.