On CCP oversight, US and EU may be closer than they appear

Competing proposals on foreign CCP oversight have more in common than recent rhetoric implies

For the better part of two years, regulators in the US and Europe have been embroiled in an unusually acrimonious dispute over the supervision of foreign clearing houses.

At issue are competing approaches for assessing whether a foreign central counterparty (CCP) poses a systemic risk to domestic markets.  

The US Commodity Futures Trading Commission has proposed a quantitative test – dubbed 20/20 – based on the amount of initial margin posted by US clients to the foreign clearing house, and