Financial Markets: A View from LaSalle Street

Regulatory changes in swaps markets mandated by the Dodd-Frank Act of 2010 will begin to be implemented this year, marking a huge shift from opaque bilateral trading to electronic trading and centralized clearing, with great impact on Chicago-based clearinghouses. In addition, fallout from the failures of MF Global and Peregrine Financial may usher in changes to industry structure with regard to protection of futures customers’ funds. Derivatives markets have also been transformed by high-speed trading, where the combination of computerized quantitative models and high-speed communications technology enable transmission of thousands of trade orders per second. Policy-related information on these and other derivatives industry topics changes may be useful to industry participants and regulators as well and will be posted on this page.