Release: #4618-02
For Release: March 13, 2002

INTERNATIONAL FUTURES REGULATORS MEETING

Boca Raton, Florida - Financial services regulators from Austria, Brazil, Canada (Alberta, Manitoba, Ontario and Quebec), France, Germany, Ireland, Italy, Japan, Mexico, the Peoples Republic of China, Singapore, Switzerland, Taiwan, Turkey, the United Kingdom, and the United States will meet on March 15, 2002. They will discuss recent events and changes in the regulatory landscape. Also on the agenda are practical approaches to organizing regulation in an increasingly integrated global futures market in order to facilitate effective supervision of cross-border business.

Commenting on this meeting, James E. Newsome, Chairman of the Commodity Futures Trading Commission, said:

We welcome this opportunity to convene a forum to exchange ideas reflecting a broad-spectrum of interests concerning how derivatives regulators can better meet the new risks and challenges that recent events have posed.

We also are very pleased to provide this opportunity for international regulators, exchanges, intermediaries, the National Futures Association, the Futures Industry Association and the Institute for Financial Markets to share ideas on ways to reduce unnecessary regulatory burdens and to facilitate cross-border access while continuing to ensure customer and market protections.

The Commodity Futures Modernization Act of 2000 significantly revised the structure of U.S. futures regulation by embracing a flexible, pro-competitive approach. Our new regulatory authority encourages us to work together with our international colleagues to improve the global marketplace.

A major focus of the discussions will be to identify how regulators can assure flexible regulation of futures markets to meet its goals. Topic will include:

• An industry view of the impact of new market flexibility on international provision of financial services;
• Clearing and settlement, including prospects for harmonization, standards and other global issues;
• Anti-money laundering from the perspective of securities regulators;
• Contingency planning;
• Systematizing regulatory alerts between regulators on fitness of financial professionals;
• A report on an experiment in regulatory cooperation – Euronext, a year later; and
• Regulatory developments in Canada, Asia, and Brazil and the Americas;
• Regulatory responses to current events.