BlockBeats News, June 26th. The U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) and the Commodity Futures Trading Commission (CFTC) jointly announced a request for public comment on a coordinated framework for the regulation of securities, security-based swaps, futures, swaps, and related margin holdings, to assess whether enhancing regulatory coordination between the two agencies would help improve risk management efficiency, reduce market fragmentation, and enhance customer protection.

SEC Chairman Paul Atkins stated that the cross-margining mechanism is expected to release liquidity currently held in separate accounts. CFTC Chairman Mike Selig stated that strengthening the two agencies' cooperation on portfolio margining is expected to unlock underutilized capital while ensuring a more robust risk management framework and market protection.

This request for comments involves current portfolio margining models and practices, considerations for customer protection, cross-margining and cross-product hedging, capital/isolation/collateral treatment, risk management approaches, clearinghouse and derivatives clearing organization issues, operational and technical implementation issues, as well as potential impacts on market liquidity and competition. The comment period is 60 days after publication in the Federal Register.