LONDON (Reuters) - Central banks and financial regulators urgently need to get to grips with the growing influence of ‘Big Tech’, according to top officials from central bank umbrella group the Bank for International Settlements (BIS).

Global watchdogs are increasingly wary that the huge amounts of data controlled by groups such as Facebook, Google, Amazon and Alibaba could allow them to reshape finance so rapidly that it destabilises entire banking systems.

The BIS, in a paper led by its head Agustin Carstens, pointed to examples such as China where the two big tech payment firms Alipay and WeChat Pay now account for 94% of the mobile payments market.

China has already rattled its markets with a series of clampdowns here on top tech and e-commerce firms. Last November regulators torpedoed the public listing of Jack Ma's fintech Ant Group and in the nine months since other tech giants and, lately, tutoring firms, have all faced scrutiny.

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As President Biden nears a decision about who should be the next Federal Reserve chairman, the current chief is getting criticized by progressives for his record on bank regulation and the postcrisis rulebook for Wall Street.

During Chairman Jerome Powell’s nearly four years as head of the Fed, the central bank has revamped big-bank stress tests, tailored its rules for U.S. lenders based on their size and simplified key postcrisis regulations such as the Volcker rule prohibition on proprietary trading.

But some progressive Democrats have said Mr. Powell’s Fed hasn’t been tough enough on large financial firms, arguing that the central bank’s tweaks to rules adopted after the 2008-09 financial crisis significantly softened the impact of the 2010 Dodd-Frank law, designed to ward off another financial crisis. Were it not for trillions of dollars in fiscal relief from Congress and an array of Fed backstops to credit markets, the banks might have gotten into trouble...

WASHINGTON—Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen on Monday revealed further measures to avoid breaching the federal government’s borrowing limit and urged Congress to increase or suspend the ceiling, which went back into effect on Sunday.

Starting Monday, the Treasury Department will suspend reinvestments by a number of retirement funds for civil servants and postal workers, Ms. Yellen said in a letter to congressional leaders. The funds will be made whole once the debt limit is either suspended or increased, she said.

“I respectfully urge Congress to protect the full faith and credit of the United States by acting as soon as possible,” she said.

Congress voted in July 2019 to suspend the debt limit until July 31, 2021, after which the prior limit of $22 trillion would be reset to include any new borrowing in the intervening years. On Sunday, the limit was reinstated at around $28.5 trillion, a figure that includes debt held by the public and by government...

The country is back open, but City workers are already bracing for some parts of it to slam back shut again.

Just over 60% of UK-based market professionals in a poll from Deutsche Bank's research unit see some form of “daily life [or] economic restrictions to still be in place” and 16% expected life to be “heavily restricted after a fresh wave of Covid-19 cases” by December. 

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Americans are circumventing bans intended to stop U.S. customers from accessing overseas cryptocurrency exchanges, new research suggests.

A report released Friday found that hundreds of Americans are trading risky crypto derivatives on offshore exchanges such as FTX and Binance. The report sheds light on an open secret in the industry: U.S. crypto enthusiasts can easily bypass measures that seek to block them from offshore exchanges.

Crypto derivatives allow traders to place leveraged bets on whether bitcoin, dogecoin or other digital currencies will rise or fall. In the U.S., such products are regulated by the Commodity Futures Trading Commission. By operating outside of the U.S. and not serving American clients, exchanges can avoid numerous CFTC rules, including investor-protection requirements and safeguards against money laundering and market manipulation.

“U.S. customers will likely have little or no protection if they trade with unregistered...

WASHINGTON — In a hunt for funds to help pay for the Senate’s bipartisan infrastructure package, lawmakers have turned to the cryptocurrency industry as a potential source of tax revenue and are proposing tougher scrutiny of digital transactions.

A provision of the package would require cryptocurrency brokers and investors to provide more disclosure about their transactions to the Internal Revenue Service. The aim is to bring more transparency to an opaque sector, which critics argue is a haven for money laundering and tax evasion. But the provision also underscores the realization in Washington that the $2 trillion industry is here to stay and offers a new opportunity to generate federal tax revenue.

By strengthening tax enforcement on such digital assets, the federal government could raise $28 billion over a decade, according to an estimate by the Joint Committee on Taxation, which analyzed the plan. While that would be just a small fraction of the $550 billion...

China’s central bank vowed to maintain heavy regulatory pressure on cryptocurrency trading and speculation after escalating its clampdown in the sector earlier this year.

The People’s Bank of China will also supervise financial platform companies to rectify their practices according to regulations, it said in a statement on Saturday. Policy makers met on Friday to discuss work priorities for the second half of the year.

Cryptocurrencies are big business. But many of them carry a heavy carbon footprint — putting them in the crosshairs of EU policymakers now determined to tackle climate change and reduce companies' carbon emissions.

Bitcoin, the biggest in the cryptocurrency world, costs some $40,000 to buy one unit, putting its market value at close to $750 billion (at the time of publication). The second-most valuable is Ethereum, worth around $270 billion. The high prices have triggered a gold rush, and lawmakers are wary of sending mixed signals.

“We need consistency in the policy,” said Finnish S&D member of the European Parliament Eero Heinäluoma, pointing to Brussels’ efforts to green the EU economy and reduce carbon emissions by 55 percent over the next nine years. “It is not very credible to legitimize and boost at the same time crypto assets that are based on a technology using more energy than some member states.”

By Rebekah Tunstead April 29, 2021, Risk Non-financial corporates have been slow to sign up to a Libor fallback protocol devised by the International Swaps and Derivatives Association, with just 14 out of 100 of the largest listed companies adopting the standard language to future-proof swaps contracts, according to research by Risk.net. 

The analysis was conducted across the top 25 non-financial constituents by market capitalisation in four major stock market indexes. The data show six of the largest 25 corporates in both the S&P 500 and FTSE 100 have adopted the new language, including Apple, Microsoft, Coca Cola, BP, and Shell. Only one top-25 non-financial firm in each of the Euro Stoxx 50 and Nikkei 225 has so far signed up to the protocol – Spain’s Iberdrola and Japan’s Hitachi (see table A).full article

By Ameya Karve and Chanyaporn Chanjaroen April 29, 2021, Bloomberg Singapore banks are pressing on in their transition away from the discredited London interbank offered rate as financial centers around the world are facing deadlines to move off Libor-priced loans and securities.

After Friday, lenders and borrowers must stop using the Singapore dollar swap offer rate (SOR), computed using Libor, for new loans and other so-called cash products and use a new benchmark. That’s the guidance that’s been in place since last year from a steering committee formed by the city-state’s central bank.full article

By Thomas Helm April 3, 2021, Practice Insight from IFLR The momentum building behind the green transition has reached extraordinary levels, according to several high profile politicians and fund managers.

Key elements in the current push to green include the election of Joe Biden, an increase in extreme, climate-change-related weather patterns, furious investor appetite, as well as a more widespread appreciation of the economic opportunities associated with green investment and the risks of being left behind.full article

By Aislinn Keely May 1, 2021, The Block

Hester Peirce, a commissioner for the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC), said she’s looking forward to a Gary Gensler-led commission.

In a keynote conversation at an Official Monetary and Financial Institutions Forum conference on Thursday, Peirce — widely viewed as crypto-friendly by the industry given her past statements and interest in crypto-specific policy moves — said it could be “a very productive few years” with Gensler at the agency’s helm.

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By Miriam Gottfried and Juliet Chung April 28, 2021, The Wall Street Journal Some private equity firms and hedge funds are pushing back against a proposal from President Biden to end the carried-interest tax advantage these types of firms enjoy.Mr. Biden is unveiling a $1.8 trillion proposal that includes new spending on child care, education and paid leave, as well as extensions of some tax breaks. To pay for it, he would largely raise taxes on the wealthiest Americans, including many on Wall Street.full article

An overabundance of cash in U.S. interest-rate markets has for the first time ever pushed the amount that investors are parking at a major central bank facility to more than $1 trillion.

Eighty-six participants on Friday placed an unprecedented total of $1.04 trillion at the Federal Reserve’s overnight reverse repurchase facility, in which counterparties like money-market funds can place cash with the central bank. That surpassed the previous all-time high volume of $991.939 billion from June 30, New York Fed data show.

WASHINGTON—Investors barely reacted last week when Federal Reserve officials signaled they could announce plans to start reducing their bond buying later this year. That was a relief for policy makers eager to avoid a repeat of the market turmoil that erupted in 2013 when the Fed made a similar announcement.

The Fed’s next test will come when it outlines a concrete plan for when and how it will scale back, or taper, the asset purchases.

The central bank has been buying $120 billion a month of Treasury and mortgage securities since June 2020, a pace officials say will continue until the economic recovery advances further. By bidding up the price of long-term bonds, the purchases tend to hold down borrowing costs for businesses and consumers, since bond prices and yields move in opposite directions.

Some investors worry that yields will jump significantly higher when the Fed stops buying bonds. The Fed’s indication in 2013 that it would eventually wind...

Federal Reserve officials are gathering in Washington this week with monetary policy still set to emergency mode, even as the economy rebounds and inflation accelerates.

Economists expect the central bank’s postmeeting statement at 2 p.m. Wednesday to leave policy unchanged, but investors will keenly watch a subsequent news conference with the Fed chair, Jerome H. Powell, for any hints at when — and how — officials might begin to pull back their economic support.

That’s because Fed policymakers are debating their plans for future “tapering,” the widely used term for slowing down monthly purchases of government-backed debt. The bond purchases are meant to keep money chugging through the economy by encouraging lending and spending, and slowing them would be the first step in moving policy toward a more normal setting.