STOCK MARKET WATCH -- Tuesday, 18 June 2013

[Demeter]

14. EU not trying to weaken U.S. financial services rules OF COURSE NOT!

http://www.reuters.com/article/2013/06/13/usa-eu-financialservices-idUSL2N0EP1A920130613?feedType=RSS&feedName=governmentFilingsNews

The European Union does not want to use negotiations with the United States on a free trade agreement to weaken recent U.S. financial regulatory reforms, an EU official said on Thursday, responding to concerns raised by U.S. politicians.

But the EU is interested in exploring how financial regulations across the Atlantic can be made more compatible to allow new business opportunities, Peter Kerstens, a counselor at the European Commission's office in Washington, said at a discussion on the proposed U.S.-EU trade pact.

"We do not want to include financial market regulations to liberalize or to deregulate the sector. We actually want to improve financial market regulation," Kerstens said...Senator Sherrod Brown, an Ohio Democrat, last week said he was concerned that both "Wall Street and industry-friendly European regulators" hoped to use the U.S.-EU negotiations to roll back reforms made by Congress in the 2010 Dodd-Frank bill. U.S. officials, sensitive to those concerns, say they want to discuss financial regulations in "parallel" talks outside the U.S.-EU pact and note there are several international forums where further reforms are already being discussed.

Kerstens said the EU has also tightened up its own financial regulation in the wake of the 2008-09 crisis.

"Any assertions that ... the European Union wants to deconstruct Dodd-Frank, or wants to assist the industry in deconstructing Dodd-Frank, I think is just illusionary. We did not spend more than five years of hard labor reforming the European financial sector to do away will all these reforms in a trade negotiations," Kerstens said...