As stated in the note from the Sunlight Foundation′s Board Chair, as of September 2020 the Sunlight Foundation is no longer active. This site is maintained as a static archive only.

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Futures industry nabs former government regulator as new leader

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In the latest example of a former financial regulator finding employment in the industry, the Futures Industry Association (FIA) has announced that its new president will be a former leader at the Commodity Futures Trading Commission (CFTC).

Walter Lukken was nominated to the commission by former President George W. Bush and chaired the agency's global markets advisory committee while there. From 2007-2008, when the financial crisis was at its height, he served as its acting chairman. Lukken resigned when President Obama took office in 2009.

In his current role as chief executive officer for New York Portfolio Clearing, he ...

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Super PAC profile: Ron Paul Volunteers offers contributors’ protection program?

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Lack of transparency can be a good thing, declares the treasurer of “Ron Paul Volunteers,” a Miami-based Super PAC he recently established in hopes of raising “in the low six figures” to help support Paul bid in Florida's Jan. 31 presidential primary.

“I think to a certain extent we have an entrenched political establishment that for the most part has a clear punishment and reward system,” treasurer Hector Roos told Sunlight in an interview. “If you are going to put money out there against a candidate it might hurt you immediately in the public light or when it comes ...

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Food and media companies donated generously to lawmakers opposing food marketing guidelines for kids

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Last summer, a bipartisan group of House members from Pennsylvania wrote federal agencies complaining that proposed guidelines restricting the marketing of unhealthy food to children marked “an alarming regulatory overreach.” They emphasized their sugary roots in “the leading confectionary producing state in the nation.” 

Indeed, Pennsylvania is home to the 117-year-old Hershey Company, maker of the ubiquitous Hershey’s kiss. But what the lawmakers from the Keystone State didn’t say was that they had other “constituents”—out-of-state campaign cash constituents, many of them Washington-based trade associations. 

The massive lobbying push by food and media interests against the controversial guidelines ...

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Meetings missing from CFTC website

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A week before Commodity Futures Trading Commission (CFTC) commissioners unanimously approved new rules restricting how brokerage firms may invest customer funds, executives from Newedge, which had pushed against the rules along with the now bankrupt firm MF Global, attended several meetings with high ranking CFTC officials.

However, not all of these meetings were disclosed on the agency's official logs that track meetings of CFTC officials with outsiders on implementation of the Dodd-Frank financial law.

On November 28, the CEO and high level executives from Newedge, a global brokerage firm, attended two meetings at the CFTC, according to meeting log ...

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Food and media companies lobby to weaken guidelines on marketing food to children

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A major lobbying push by a powerful group of food and media companies appears to be working, with a federal agency indicating it would back off on parts of proposed voluntary guidelines for marketing food to children. The guidelines are meant to combat childhood obesity.

Also, language in a pending congressional spending bill, one of several that Congress must approve before the end of the year to keep the government running, threatens to prohibit the agency, the Federal Trade Commission (FTC), from issuing a final version of the nutritional guidelines at all without doing a cost-benefit analysis first.

Big companies ...

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Central banks ease terms on currency swaps

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Stocks surged today as the announcement settled in that six central banks are joining forces to ease terms of currency liquidity swaps. As we have reported earlier here and here, the European Central Bank has recently been increasing its borrowing under the emergency swap facility, which is similar to that set up during the 2008 financial crisis, when lending at one point peaked at $586 billion.

While the Federal Reserve reports the totals that flow through this facility weekly here, it does not provide information on which banks in turn receive loans from other central banks. The European Central Bank ...

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Senators grilling FTC commissioner on obesity guidelines took campaign money from industry

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When Jon Leibowitz faced a Senate committee yesterday afternoon for a hearing on his renomination as commissioner of the Federal Trade Commission (FTC), he got a grilling from several Senators, Democrats and Republicans alike, on a controversial issue: the agency’s proposed guidelines on advertising food to children, meant to help in the fight to reduce childhood obesity.

All of these senators have taken substantial sums in campaign contributions from food industry and media interests that have been lobbying against the proposed guidelines, which the food industry has charged go too far.

Sen. Kay Bailey Hutchison, R-Texas, asked Leibowitz if ...

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European Central Bank borrowing from Federal Reserve on the rise

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The European Central Bank (ECB) today announced more than $2 billion in borrowing from the Federal Reserve's currency swap line, the highest amount since the U.S. central bank reopened this facility in May 2010.

The increased borrowing comes amidst reports that the private foreign currency market is chilling, with the cost of European banks obtaining dollars on the rise. While the conditions are not nearly as bad as they became during the 2008 financial crisis, when foreign exchange markets froze and Fed currency swaps with foreign central banks rose to $586 billion, the increasing amounts are another indicator ...

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MF Global pushed regulators to use client funds

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Late last year MF Global—the failed investment firm headed by Democratic heavyweight Jon S. Corzine that can't account for as much as $900 million of its clients' money--urged a federal agency to allow futures firms to invest funds from their customer segregated accounts in foreign sovereign debt. 

In a December 2010 comment letter to the Commodities Future Trading Commission (CFTC), MF Global, along with another firm, Newedge, argued that the agency’s proposal to disallow such investments “is unnecessary, and will eliminate a liquid, secure, profitable and necessary category of investment....no foreign country that actually defaulted on ...

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Federal Reserve delays release of transcripts of major meetings

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If you want to know who says what at next week's meeting of the Federal Reserve’s Federal Open Market Committee (FOMC), which oversees market operations for the central bank, you will have to wait until the year 2016 to find out.

While the FOMC releases the minutes of these meetings three weeks after the fact, full transcripts are kept secret for five years. Right now the most recent transcript available is for December 13, 2005. And even these transcripts have been edited from the original.

As a result, the public still does not know the details of what ...

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