The saga involving the proposed regulation of over-the-counter derivatives, as covered in this post from last month, continues.

For several weeks, Senator Christopher Dodd (D., Conn.) has been expected to introduce a bill that addresses several of the stickier issues surrounding OTC derivatives. Over the past month, he has been working with Senator Bob Corker (R., Tenn.) to come up with a bipartisan plan. Other legislators who’ve been working on the bill are Jack Reed (D., Rhode Island) and Judd Gregg (R., New Hampshire).

The most contentious issue continues to revolve around “the end user exemptions,” says Luke Zubrod, director of U.S. public real estate advisory practice with Chatham Financial, a consulting firm specializing in managing interest rate and foreign exchange risk. That is, will businesses that use derivatives to hedge their risks be treated differently than financial institutions that participate in the market to a much greater extent? more

Management teams that are on the prowl for acquisitions may find themselves doing some treasure hunting. That’s because they likely will find a growing amount of opportunity in distressed assets, or the debt or equity of a company that has declared bankruptcy or is restructuring itself. That was one of the points that was made clear during a webcast hosted by Ernst & Young last week, titled, appropriately enough, “Buying Distressed Assets.”

After all, business bankruptcy filings more than doubled between 2006 and 2008, jumping from 19,695 to 43,546, reports the research group American Bankruptcy Institute. Filings in the third quarter of 2009 (the latest data available), at 15,177, were nearly three times those of the third quarter of 2006.

Similarly, the number of mass layoffs – a rough proxy for corporate restructurings – jumped from 938 for the month of February 2006 to 1,761 in January 2010, according to the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics. more

As fans of TV shows like 24 know, transferring money via wire is secure and instantaneous. That means you can grab it and go – which is critical when the bad guys (or gals) are on your tail. Nonetheless, the system has some shortcomings that have frustrated companies that send or receive money via wire transfers.

Chief among these is the fact that today’s wire transfers lack much remittance information. In fact, the remit info often is limited to just several hundred characters – definitely not enough to let a vendor know, for instance, that your payment covers half a dozen invoices, minus a credit that you’re owed. If your company is like most, you end up sending faxes or emails to accompany your payments and provide directions on applying the money. Your vendor then is left with the task of making sure this information makes its way to the appropriate payments. Perhaps it’s not surprising that 94 percent of respondents to a 2006 study conducted by The Federal Reserve Banks and The Clearing House indicated that they found it valuable to include remittance information with payments. In fact, more than half said they would pay more for wires that included remittance information.

Instead, both sides are stuck with a process that is time-consuming and next to impossible to automate. more

To be sure, the recession clearly has hurt cross-border business, with the dollar value of global trade falling by nearly one-third between August 2008 and March 2009, although it has since rebounded some, The World Bank reports in “Global Economic Prospects 2010.”

However, globalization marches on, and companies still are expanding abroad. In fact, earnings from the foreign affiliates of U.S.-based companies grew from $63 to $80 billion between the first and third quarters of 2009, reports the U.S. Department of Commerce. The report acknowledges that the increase partly reflects the depreciation of the U.S. dollar, which makes earnings of foreign affiliates relatively higher when compared to domestic earnings. Even so, the report adds that the pickup in activity in some foreign countries also contributed to the uptick in earnings. more

In this post from last fall, I wrote about the efforts under way by members of the business community to fight changes proposed by the SEC to the regulations governing money market funds. The changes would have restricted the funds from holding commercial paper from A2/P2 issuers, such as companies like Alcoa, Inc. and Marriott International, Inc. In a post several months before that, I wrote about changes proposed to the regulation of over-the-counter (OTC) derivatives proposed by the U.S. Department of the Treasury. That proposal would have required standardized OTC derivative transactions to take place on exchanges. more