ORLANDO, Florida – US adoption of international accounting rules is not coming any time soon, the “absolute soonest” being five to six years’ time, according to the head of a leading US accounting body.

BASEL/MADRID – International regulators are consulting on proposals for dealing with financial market infrastructure (FMI) providers that run into difficulties threatening their viability or even fail completely.

NEW YORK – The US ban on ‘short selling’ introduced at the height of the financial crisis did more harm than good, according to a study published by the New York Federal Reserve in early August. Restrictions on the short selling of financial stocks were imposed in September 2008, at a time of intense market stress by the US and a number of other countries.

PARIS – New guidelines have been issued by the European Securities and Markets Authority (ESMA), the pan-EU supervisory watchdog, aimed at tightening the regulatory regime for Exchange Traded Funds (ETFs) and other types of index-tracker funds authorised to be sold to European retail investors.

SALZBURG, Austria – Europe’s sovereign debt crisis, which is not least driven by systemic problems in some countries, underscores the urgent need to make the financial system more resilient, according to German central banker Andreas Dombret.

BASEL – Global banking regulators, fearing that the rapid growth of the world’s massive currency market means huge trade settlement risks are unabated, are proposing new guidance on managing those risks.

WASHINGTON – The US Federal Reserve is working with supervisors and central banks outside the US to ensure that rules relating to systemically important financial firms are enforced in a consistent way, US Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner told Washington lawmakers in late July.

JACKSON HOLE, Wyoming – Rebalancing the three-pillar structure of the international Basel bank capital adequacy accord would provide greater scope for supervisory judgment in financial regulation, UK central banker Andrew Haldane said in his wide-ranging remarks on the complexity of current regulation (see page 1).

BRUSSELS – Global regulators’ plans for the supervision of large cross-border insurance companies should aim at recognising local regimes rather than setting a new single regulatory standard for groups, according to Europe’s insurance industry.

The Basel Committee of global banking supervisors issued the interim rule in July as part of the efforts by leaders of the Group of Twenty (G20) top economies to reduce the systemic risk in the financial system seen as inherent in the $650 trillion privately traded over-the-counter (OTC) derivatives markets. A G20 aim is the get the bulk of OTC trading cleared through CCPs. Clearing houses, an established feature of exchange-traded derivatives markets, stand as buyer to every seller and seller to every buyer in the market, thereby obviating the risk of loss to an individual trader arising from a counterparty default. The capital rule for banks is one of the final elements of the international Basel III bank capital and liquidity package that’s due to start coming into effect from January 2013.