Swap Jurisdiction Certainty Act

Floor Speech

BREAK IN TRANSCRIPT

Mr. ELLISON. Mr. Speaker, I will get right to the point: AIG, Citibank, and Lehman are recent examples of institutions where the U.S. parent was hurt by those firms' problems abroad. Lehman had 3,300 subsidiaries at the time they declared bankruptcy, and its London subsidiary had more than 130,000 outstanding swaps contracts, many of them guaranteed by Lehman Brothers Holdings, headquartered in the U.S.

Bank of America, for example, has more than 2,000 subsidiaries, with 38 percent of them in foreign jurisdictions. Bank of America's books its derivatives not only in the U.S. but also in the U.K. and in Ireland.

Now, a very simple fact, Mr. Speaker, is that Dodd-Frank, the bill that has been deconstructed before our very eyes, while the ink is still wet on the page, requires that all foreign or U.S. firms transacting with U.S. persons comply with derivatives market reform.

We're taking that apart right now. That's a shame, and it's going to put that guy who wants to buy beer in Texas at risk for his job and his house and everything else.

BREAK IN TRANSCRIPT

Source