Commodity Futures Trading Commission March 2015 – Federal Register Recent Federal Regulation Documents

In compliance with the Paperwork Reduction Act of 1995 (PRA), this notice announces that the Information Collection Request (ICR) abstracted below has been forwarded to the Office of Management and Budget (OMB) for review and comment. The ICR describes the nature of the information collection and its expected costs and burden.

This is a correction to the preamble of a document published by the Commodity Futures Trading Commission (``Commission'') in the Federal Register of February 25, 2015, regarding the reopening of the comment periods for proposed rulemakings to establish speculative position limits for 28 exempt and agricultural commodity futures and options contracts and the physical commodity swaps that are economically equivalent to such contracts (the ``Position Limits Proposal'') and to amend existing regulations setting out the Commission's policy for aggregation under its position limits regime (the ``Aggregation Proposal''). This correction clarifies the closing date for the reopened comment periods, which was inadvertently set to fall on a non-business day.

The Commodity Futures Trading Commission (``Commission'' or ``CFTC'') is amending its regulations to remove the December 31, 2018 automatic termination date for the phased-in compliance schedule for futures commission merchants (``FCMs'') and provides assurance that the residual interest deadline, as defined in the regulations (``Residual Interest Deadline''), will only be revised through a separate Commission rulemaking.

This release is the Commodity Futures Trading Commission's (``Commission'' or ``CFTC'') initial response to the order of the United States District Court for the District of Columbia in Securities Industry and Financial Markets Association, et al. v. United States Commodity Futures Trading Commission remanding eight swaps-related rulemakings to the Commission to address what the court held to be inadequacies in the Commission's consideration of costs and benefits, or its explanation of its consideration of costs and benefits, in those rulemakings. In this release, the Commission: supplements the preambles to the remanded rulemakings by clarifying that the costs and benefits identified therein applied both to domestic swaps activities and activities outside the United States that are subject to the Commission's swaps rules by operation of section 2(i) of the Commodity Exchange Act (``CEA''); and solicits comments on whether there are cross-border costs or benefits associated with the remanded rules that differ from those associated with activities within the United States. Following its review of the comments, the Commission will publish a further response to the District Court remand order which would include any supplementation of or changes to its consideration of the costs and benefits of the relevant rules as set forth in the rule preambles. The Commission will also consider whether to amend any of these rules in light of information developed in this process.