esma short selling consultation February 15, 2012
Posted by Bradley in : consultation, transparency , add a commentThe responses are in and you can see them here. A number of the responses comment on the very short time for consultation. Today there’s a new consultation on technical advice relating to the same regulation which closes on March 9. The Consultation document says:
Who should read this paper
This paper may be specifically of interest to investors that take short positions, hedge funds, investment
firms whose clients hold short positions or engage in CDS activity, securities lending firms, hedge funds,
prime brokers, custodians, settlement systems, national debt management agencies and issuers.
But they still only get just over 3 weeks to respond.
There will be an open hearing on 29 February 2012.
Meanwhile I have been working on a paper on transparency and financial regulation in the EU.
esma consults on draft technical standards on short selling and credit default swaps January 25, 2012
Posted by Bradley in : consultation , 1 comment so farThe consultation on draft technical standards on short selling and certain aspects of credit default swaps began yesterday and lasts until February 13. The Commission seems to have given ESMA over 4 months to provide the advice (from the end of November to the end of March) but it took ESMA two months to develop its consultation and it plans to use 6 weeks or so to finalise its advice. That leaves 2.5 weeks for public input. This is a bit of a contrast to the general lengthening of consultation periods the Commission announced at the beginning of the month.
uk consultation on registration of lobbyists January 20, 2012
Posted by Bradley in : consultation, transparency , add a commentThe Consultation Document is here. The document proposes that a body independent of Government and the lobbying industry should manage the register (a new arm’s length body?). The appropriate definition of lobbying is a central issue. Here are some of the questions posed by the document:
Should in-house lobbyists be covered? Many large companies have employees whose main duties are to lobby on behalf of that company. The Government proposes that only those lobbying on behalf of third parties should be covered by the Register. Given that is clear whose interests they represent, it is not evident that an extension of the register to in-house lobbyists would provide any additional transparency.
Should lobbyists or firms acting on a pro bono basis have an exemption from the duty to register?
Should organisations which engage in lobbying on behalf of interest groups such as Think Tanks and Charities be required to register? If so, how might this be captured in the definition of lobbying or lobbyist?
The Government does not wish to discourage the normal activity between constituents and MPs. Should there be an explicit exemption included in any definition?
new year, new consultation in the eu January 4, 2012
Posted by Bradley in : consultation , add a commentThe Commission announced yesterday that it is lengthening the consultation procedure from 8 to 12 weeks. And, probably to encourage registration: lobbyists who are registered on the transparency register will get early alerts about proposed initiatives:
The Commission has also introduced an alert service for upcoming initiatives: Organisations that sign up for the Transparency Register, can subscribe to this alert service to get early information on the roadmaps for new initiatives in their fields of interest about one year before there (sic) adoption.
Of course those who aren’t lobbyists aren’t supposed to be on the Transparency Register, and they don’t get the early heads up either. So it’s a bit of a mixed bag. Let’s make life easier for lobbyists if they agree to let us watch them. But it doesn’t seem to do much to encourage more general citizen participation in consultations (which seems to be what the public statements suggest will happen):
The President of the European Commission, José Manuel Barroso, said: “A key part of getting our policies right is listening to the people who will be affected by them. By keeping our consultations open longer we will strengthen the voice of the citizens, businesses and organisations that help us shape our policies for the benefit of all.”
pre-announcement of uk’s call for evidence on pfi November 15, 2011
Posted by Bradley in : consultation , add a commentThe UK plans to make a call for evidence on December 1 with a view to amending the private finance initiative. Here’s what the pre-announcement says:
The Government will expect a new delivery model to draw on private sector innovation but at a lower cost to the taxpayer, offering better value for our investment in public services. The Government’s approach to reform will be guided by the following principles, to create a model that:
is less expensive, and that uses private sector innovation to deliver services more cost effectively;
can access a wider range of financing sources, including encouraging a stronger role to be played by pension fund investment;
strikes a better balance between risk and reward to the private sector;
has greater flexibility to accommodate changing public service needs over time;
maintains the incentive on the private sector to deliver capital projects to time and to budget and to take performance risk on the delivery of services;
delivers an accelerated and cheaper procurement process; and
gives greater financial transparency at all levels of the project so that the public sector is confident that it is getting what it paid for, and that the taxpayer is sure it is getting a fair deal now and over the longer term.
Do they really want to encourage pension funds to invest in pfi projects while making investment in such projects less profitable and riskier?
more governmental opacity October 20, 2011
Posted by Bradley in : consultation , add a commentAnnouncing a new steering group which is to develop a suite of ‘simple’ financial products, the UK Treasury published a summary document describing responses to its simple financial products consultation. Here’s what the document says about its presentation of responses:
The Government received 75 responses to the consultation from a wide range of organisations and individuals … In addition, three workshops were held with representatives from consumer groups, banks, building societies, insurers, cooperatives, think tanks, regulators, and independent commentators, to discuss the issues in depth. This document summarises formal responses to the consultation but does not seek to capture all of the points raised through the informal process, which, in addition to workshops, included numerous bilateral discussions and participation by officials in seminars and conferences. These events and discussions have assisted in the interpretation of formal responses and in formulating next steps for the simple products development process… While a number of themes emerged, there was no strong consensus among representatives of particular industries or sectors; nor were there clear consistent views from consumer groups and trade associations. Responses are therefore reported at a general level to avoid mischaracterising the response of any one sector or group of stakeholders.
To avoid mischaracterising responses or to avoid being seen to be mischaracterising responses?
eu tobacco consultation July 27, 2011
Posted by Bradley in : consultation , add a commentThe Commission announced that it received more than 85,000 responses to its consultation on revising the tobacco products directive carried out late in 2010. In some ways it seems to have been an extremely successful consultation. The response was significant, and 96% of the responses were from citizens. But almost two thirds of the responses came from two Member States, Italy and Poland, and the Commission suggests the Italian response was a reaction to a citizen mobilization campaign which generated a significant number of standard comments. The Commission is not making the full set of responses available online:
Given the high number of contributions, it is not considered to be useful to release an online database of individual submissions.
This exercise raises other questions about whether consultations like this one really serve a useful purpose. The Commission writes:
It is difficult to draw firm conclusions from the outcome of the public consultation procedure. In general, opinions varied significantly between and also within categories of respondents. Arguments provided by respondents in the ‘free text’ sections of the consultation present a variety of different justifications for policy action.
consultation and standard setting July 13, 2011
Posted by Bradley in : consultation , add a commentMy paper, Consultation and Legitimacy in Transnational Standard-Setting is published in 20 Minn. J. Int’l L. 480 (2011).
stakeholders, law & society June 1, 2011
Posted by Bradley in : consultation , add a commentI’m in San Francisco for the Law & Society conference (presenting my paper on stakeholders). One of the things I talk about in the paper is the idea that ordinary citizens are mostly not thought of as having anything useful to say about financial regulation (although they do bear the costs of regulatory failure). The challenge I’m thinking about is to figure out how to give citizens a more effective voice in this area (or at least a greater part of the area than the part they are currently invited into).
I wonder whether the EU has any lessons here for domestic governmental authorities? The EU Commission is now running a competition
to collect “real evidences” of the use of the Single Market by their main actors (citizens, consumers, SMEs) from all Member States.
On the other hand the story-telling idea was an idea of the current US administration, and though the EU competition opened on May 26th there seem to be only two submissions so far. The competition is open until June 24th.
e-government May 18, 2011
Posted by Bradley in : consultation , add a commentThe CFPB invites reactions to two different mortgage loan disclosure formats from consumers and from the mortgage industry. The second pages of the 2 page forms are virtually identical. The first page varies a bit in how the information is presented. The feedback mechanism is described on the web page as a tool: there is a “consumer tool” and an “industry tool”. The “tools” offer respondents the opportunity to make up to 4 comments on the details of the form (and then there’s an additional opportunity to comment later). It might be nice to see how many people who self-identified as being part of each group were responding. But it’s a good example of a consultation that asks people interested in a particular issue for their own reactions to a specific mechanism for delivering information.
Meanwhile, the UK has a much broader (and therefore hard to get a handle on what is going on within it) Red Tape Challenge. Here the idea is to justify doing away with rules rather than to make the rules work more effectively. Within the broad consultation there is a section on consumer information and protection that asks generally what should be changed. It’s possible to see the comments as they are made, but the formlessness of the consultation isn’t very satisfactory.