Implementing the Private Funds Portion of the Volcker Rule

The Asset Management Group (AMG) of SIFMA provides supplemental comments to the U.S. Department of the Treasury, the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation (FDIC), the Board of Governors of the Federal Reserve System, the Office of the Comptroller of the Currency (OCC), the Commodity Futures Trading Commission (CFTC), and the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) in advance of a Notice of Proposed Rulemaking on implementing the private funds portion of the Volcker Rule.  The Dodd-Frank Wall Street Reform and Consumer Protection Act (Dodd-Frank Act) created the new Section 13 of the Bank Holding Company Act of 1956 (the Volcker Rule).  SIFMA AMG’s observations and recommendations include: 1) the exclusion from the general definition of the terms “hedge fund” and “private equity fund;” 2) the treatment of certain parallel fund and master/feeder fund structures as a single fund for purposes of calculating the 3 percent investment limits; and 3) basing the standards for determining the independence of directors of a fund for purposes of determining whether a banking entity is a sponsor of such fund on the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation’s (FDIC’s) guidelines for determining that the audit committee of a bank’s board of directors is independent from the bank’s management.

This correspondence supplements SIFMA AMG’s previous comments submitted on April 14, 2011.