Swap Jurisdiction Certainty Act

Floor Speech

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Mr. VAN HOLLEN. Mr. Speaker, I have substantial sympathy with those seeking regulatory clarity and with U.S. companies wishing to avoid being competitively disadvantaged when operating abroad. At the same time, one of the hard-learned lessons from the recent financial crisis is that outsized risk readily crosses national boundaries, which is why prudential regulation of cross-border derivatives transactions that can impact our economy was embedded in the Dodd-Frank Wall Street Reform law.

The problem with today's legislation is that it seeks to achieve regulatory certainty for these kinds of transactions by effectively substituting foreign derivatives rules for our own safeguards unless the Commodity Futures Trading Commission (CFTC) and the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) both agree that the foreign rules in question are not ``broadly equivalent'' to our own.

Like the Administration, I would prefer for Americans to rely on U.S. law for protection in this area, and for our regulators to finish their work on these important safeguards in coordination with their foreign counterparts--rather than presume that foreign regulation, and in some cases foreign regulation that hasn't even been written yet, will be sufficient to do the job.

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