Overview: President Obama signed Dodd-Frank into law in July 2010. The purpose was to restructure the financial regulatory system to restore public confidence following the 2008 financial crisis and prevent further crises from occurring. Some regulatory agencies were consolidated, and new supervisory entities were created. The law contains consumer protection reforms and provides a process for winding down bankrupt firms in the event of a financial crisis.
Dodd-Frank imposed a regulatory structure on previously unregulated derivatives. Standardized derivatives must be traded on an exchange or swap execution facility (SEF) and centrally cleared. Non-financial entities that use swaps as a bona fide hedge are not subject to the mandatory clearing and exchange-trading requirements.
Firms must capture, monitor and store trade data and communications data so that market abuse can be detected. They must keep all communication records made through the telephone, voicemail and email, and these records must be uniformly time stamped.
Section 753 of the Act amended section 6(c) of the Commodity Exchange Act to prohibit manipulation and fraud in connection with any swap, or a contract of sale of any commodity in interstate commerce, or for future delivery on or subject to the rules of any registered entity. Section 753:
- Expands the reach of the CFTC to prohibit manipulative and fraudulent behavior by eliminating the requirement to show an artificial price and lowering the scienter standard to recklessness for fraud-based manipulations.
- Preserves the CFTC’s existing authority to prohibit the manipulation of prices even in the absence of fraud.
- Adds a special provision for manipulation by false reporting, including an exception for good faith mistakes.
- Makes it unlawful to provide materially false information to the CFTC.
Final Rule 180.1 gives the CFTC authority to enforce Section 6(c).
Rule 17 CFR § 38.156 requires firms to maintain an automated trade surveillance system capable of detecting and investigating potential trade practice violations. The automated system must load and process daily orders and trades no later than 24 hours after the completion of the trading day. In addition, the automated trade surveillance system must have the capability to detect and flag specific trade execution patterns and trade anomalies; compute, retain, and compare trading statistics; compute trade gains, losses, and futures-equivalent positions; reconstruct the sequence of market activity; perform market analyses; and support system users to perform in-depth analyses and ad hoc queries of trade-related data.