Obama's SEC and CTFC bribed by Wall St, will reverse key parts of Dodd-Frank

[Lasher]

17. The threshold is a not-insignificant sum.

By one limited set of regulatory data, 85 percent of companies would not be subject to oversight. After five years, the threshold would reset to $3 billion; it is the same amount suggested by a group of energy companies in a February 2011 letter, according to regulatory records.

When regulators first proposed the rules in late 2010, they set the exemption at $100 million. At that level, only 30 percent of the players would have been excused from the oversight, which was mandated by the Dodd-Frank financial overhaul law.

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Some watchdog groups, however, fear that regulators are carving out a significant loophole that will open the door to problems. The exemption, the culmination of wrangling among the regulators and a yearlong lobbying blitz, would excuse firms from having to post additional capital and file reports.

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But the regulatory fine print could allow many firms to whittle down the size of their activity to under $8 billion.

Under the rule, companies can exclude the swaps they use to hedge their business against risk like, say, interest rate fluctuations. And the rule would apply only to a company’s swaps transactions, so firms would not need to count their other varieties of derivatives, like forwards and options. The Commodity Futures Trading Commission also scrapped a strict provision that would have prevented companies that are exempt from the rules from arranging more than 20 swap contracts in one year, regardless of the dollar amount.

http://dealbook.nytimes.com/2012/04/17/regulators-to-ease-a-rule-on-derivatives-dealers/