The Federal Financial Forum

Editor’s Note:  For CRE’s views on use of social media in rulemaking, see here.

From: American Banker

WASHINGTON — For bank regulators and the industry, writing risk management policies around banks’ use of social media is akin to trying to board a moving bullet train.

But the agencies have won praise for attempting to propose a framework intended to be applied for both the current and future social media landscape.

“Social media is very dynamic. … It’s difficult to put in place guidance when social media is still developing and changing,” said Mercedes Kelley Tunstall, a partner at Ballard Spahr and one of three panelists who will address policy issues facing banks’ use of social media at American Banker‘s 3rd Annual Regulatory Symposium.

From: Bloomberg

By Zachary Tracer

U.S. insurance regulators are drawing on the country’s founding principles as they resist international pressure to give the federal government a greater role in overseeing the industry.

Ben Nelson, chief executive officer of the National Association of Insurance Commissioners and a former Democratic senator from Nebraska, said the current system of overseeing insurers at the state level exemplifies Thomas Jefferson’s ideas about restraints on centralized government. A Financial Stability Board review of U.S. insurance regulation has called for greater uniformity of oversight.

Editor’s Note:  President Obama has championed expanding public access to federally funded research.  The OSTP Memorandum from Dr. Holdren, “Increasing Access to the Results of Federally Funded Scientific Research” is available here.  The House of Commons has recently completed an Inquiry into British open access policy.  A comparison of US and UK policies may be helpful to policy leadership on both sides of the Atlantic. 

A news story from Nature discussing the UK report is available here.  A Glossary of key terms used in the report (Gold Access, Green Access, etc.) is available here.  Below are highlights and links to the complete text of the report.

         The CRE website was attacked with the result that had we not pulled down the website we would have risked loosing content.

         We appreciate your many emails and we are  working to continue to install state of the art  early warning systems.  We must , however, add that we have only had two major outages in more than a decade of operation.

        We are particularly concerned that some of you could not use the website for the preparation of regulatory filings.

From: American Banker

Mark Horwedel

Many in the banking industry are proclaiming the sky is falling in light of the European Union’s recent move to cap interchange fees and a U.S. federal court ruling that current debit swipe fee caps are too high. What these doomsayers conveniently forget is that the business case for introducing debit cards was one of cost avoidance for the banks, not revenue. That rationale for debit holds true today.

When debit was developed in the 1970s and 80s, interchange – the fee charged to merchants and paid to the card networks and banks everytime someone uses a debit or credit card – was not even a part of the equation.