On April 22, 2019, Secretary of State Mike Pompeo announced that the waivers issued to China, Greece, India, Italy, Japan, South Korea, Taiwan and Turkey, which allow them to continue to import Iranian oil after the United States fully reinstated secondary sanctions against Iran last fall, will expire on May…
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The U.S. banking agencies have proposed allowing custodial banking organizations to exclude certain central bank deposits from the calculation of total leverage exposure, the denominator of the U.S. Basel III supplementary leverage ratio (SLR).  The proposal implements Section 402 of the Economic Growth, Regulatory Relief and Consumer Protection…
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In separate statements on April 17, 2019 coinciding with the anniversary of the Bay of Pigs invasion, U.S. Secretary of State Mike Pompeo and National Security Adviser John Bolton announced several measures intended to increase pressure on Cuba, Venezuela, and Nicaragua, in response to corruption, human rights abuses, and political…
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The Committee on Foreign Investment in the United States (“CFIUS” or the “Committee”) recently publicly announced that it had imposed a $1 million civil monetary penalty against an undisclosed entity for repeated violations of its 2016 mitigation agreement with CFIUS, including failure to establish requisite security …
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There is now a serious effort underway by the usually divided Congress to find a way for the growing cannabis sector to enter the mainstream financial sector.  Our newest visual memorandum updates our earlier briefing on the two legislative vehicles:  the Secure and Fair Enforcement Banking Act (the SAFE Banking …
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Tom Baxter of Sullivan & Cromwell LLP, and formerly the General Counsel of the Federal Reserve Bank of New York, has written an important article titled “The Rise of Risk Management in Financial Institutions and a Potential Unintended Consequence – The Diminution of the Legal Function,” recently published by the…
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Last week, the SEC staff published new detailed guidance on its views of when a digital asset may be considered a security, in the form of two documents:  a guidance “framework” issued by the SEC’s Strategic Hub for Innovation and Financial Technology and a no-action letter from the SEC’s Division…
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In our first Cyber Blog post, we predicted that the rules-based approach adopted by the NYDFS would become the model for cybersecurity regulation.  Two years later, we’re feeling pretty good about that prediction, as the FTC recently proposed incorporating a number of aspects of the NYDFS cybersecurity rules into…
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