MSRB Releases Meeting Topics

WASHINGTON — The Municipal Securities Rulemaking Board announced Wednesday that it will discuss municipal advisor pay-to-play rulemaking, market transparency enhancement initiatives, and asset-backed securities disclosure when it meets in Alexandria, Va. Oct. 29-31.

The MSRB has received comments on its draft amendments to extend Rule G-37 on political contributions to cover municipal advisors, and must now decide whether to send the current draft to the Securities and Exchange Commission for approval or make changes. Some commenters told the board that the rule must be harmonized with other contribution limit rules in place for investment advisors in order to be constitutionally valid.

The board will also mull how to move forward on potential enhancements to the post-trade transaction data that would be disseminated from a new central transparency platform. One of the biggest changes the MSRB is proposing is the requirement to indicate which trades result from conditional trade commitments, a proposition dealers said would be hugely expensive and burdensome.

In addition, the board will discuss how to change the EMMA system to accommodate the SEC's Rule 15Ga-1, which the commission adopted in January 2011. The rule requires various disclosures by securitizers of asset-backed securities, which are securities serviced by the cash flows of consumer loans. Municipal securitizers include issuers of housing bonds or student loan bonds.

The SEC said in its rule that municipalities can make those disclosures via EMMA instead of the commission's EDGAR system. The board will be discussing the way to facilitate that. Municipal securitizers are to file those disclosures for the three years ended Dec. 31, 2014 through EMMA by Feb. 14.

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