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To provide an overview of the Commodity Futures Trading Commission’s (the “CFTC” or “Commission”) recent amendments to CFTC Rule 1.31, which sets forth recordkeeping requirements for all records required to be kept pursuant to the Commodity Exchange Act (“CEA”) and Commission regulations.

This article discusses the significant May 2017 amendments to CFTC Rule 1.31 and the practical impact of these amendments for entities subject to the rule’s requirements.

The CFTC’s recordkeeping amendments do not impose any new substantive recordkeeping requirements, but modernize and make technology neutral the form and manner in which regulatory records must be kept. By eliminating a number of prescriptive and outdated requirements, the amendments should provide greater flexibility to “records entities” to adopt new technologies in response to evolving technological developments.

Practical guidance from experienced commodities, futures and derivatives lawyers.

The purpose of this paper is to assess unit manager perspectives on the introduction of a group-based trauma-specific programme delivered across Scotland’s secure estate. As this was the first time such an estate-wide initiative had occurred, it was important to identify the benefits/challenges at a strategic level.

An exploratory qualitative case study was utilised involving semi-structured interviews with five senior unit managers in three secure units to discover their perceptions of the benefits and challenges of implementing Teaching Recovery Techniques (TRT). A quasi-qualitative analysis was used to quantify and give meaning to manager responses. Inter-rater reliability of analysis was assessed.

Unit managers perceived gains in trauma-informed knowledge for themselves, and knowledge and skills gains for programme workers, care staff and adolescents. Challenges involved: managing a shift in paradigm to include a trauma-specific programme; the limiting context of competitive tendering; short duration placements; and the need for psychoeducation for staff, parents and agencies.

Large sample sizes are likely to identify further issues for unit managers. Manager perceptions need directly compared with staff and adolescent perceptions and included in randomised control trials of trauma-specific programmes.

Managers perceived that TRT needed to be delivered within trauma-informed organisations and identified the need for manager training in traumatisation, trauma recovery and organisational implications to guide strategic planning. Managers emphasised the need for psychoeducation for families, staff and agencies.

The current study is the first in Scotland to explore unit manager experience of introducing a trauma-specific programme across the secure estate.

This paper aims to examine the economic impact from dark-sky tourism in national parks in the USA on the Colorado Plateau. The Colorado Plateau is a region encompassing parts of Arizona, Colorado, New Mexico and Utah that is known for its dark, star-filled night skies. Tourists in national parks are increasingly interested in observing this natural recreational amenity – especially considering that it is an ecological amenity that is quickly disappearing from the planet. Using a 10-year forecast of visitors to the national parks and using standard input-output modeling, it is observed that, for the first time anywhere, the value of dark skies to tourism in this area. The authors find that non-local tourists who value dark skies will spend $5.8bn over the next 10 years in the Colorado Plateau. These tourist expenditures will generate $2.4bn in higher wages and create over 10,000 additional jobs each year for the region. Furthermore, as dark skies are even more intense natural amenity in the non-summer months, they have the ability to increase visitor counts to national parks year-round and lead to a more efficient use of local community and tourism-related resources throughout the year.

Using a 10-year forecast of visitors to the national parks and using standard input-output modeling, we find that non-local tourists who value dark skies will spend $5.8bn over the next 10 years in the Colorado Plateau.

These tourist expenditures will generate $2.4bn in higher wages and create over 10,000 additional jobs each year for the region. Furthermore, as dark skies are even more intense natural amenity in the non-summer months, they have the ability to increase visitor counts to national parks year-round and lead to a more efficient use of local community and tourism-related resources throughout the year.

To the best of the authors’ knowledge, no other study has attempted to value the environmental amenity of dark skies.

To provide an overview of a new, streamlined process from the Division of Swap Dealer and Intermediary Oversight (DSIO) of the Commodity Futures Trading Commission (CFTC) by which a commodity pool operator (CPO) may request expedited no-action relief for failure to register under Section 4m(1) of the Commodity Exchange Act if such CPO has designated another, registered CPO to serve as the CPO of the commodity pool.

Explains the background to the CPO registration no-action relief related to CPO delegation and the streamlined process for requesting no-action relief, including the procedure for requesting relief and the applicable criteria that must be satisfied to utilize the streamlined process.

By providing an alternative, streamlined process for requesting no-action relief from CPO registration in the context of delegation arrangements in certain circumstances, the CFTC staff is attempting to facilitate obtaining such relief, particularly since relief may be sought on behalf of multiple commodity pools by means of a single request. However, the criteria that must be fulfilled in order to utilize the streamlined process are not necessarily applicable to all CPOs and in all scenarios. Thus, certain CPOs may need to request no-action relief outside of the new, streamlined process or consider alternative fund structures.

Practical guidance from experienced asset management lawyers.

To explain CFTC No-Action Letter 14-126, issued on October 15, 2014 by the Commodity Futures Trading Commission Division of Swap Dealer and Intermediary Oversight, which sets forth a number of conditions with which a commodity pool operator (“CPO”) that delegates its CPO responsibilities (“Delegating CPO”) to a registered CPO (“Designated CPO”) must comply in order to take advantage of no-action relief from the requirement to register as a CPO.

Explains the modified conditions provided by Letter 14-126, including clarification of the permissible activities in which a Delegating CPO seeking to take advantage of registration no-action relief may engage regarding investment management, solicitation, and management of pool property; lists other criteria carried over from Letter 14-69 of May 12, 2014; provides analysis and discusses limitations of the relief provided by the CFTC No-Action letter.

The letter makes more liberal several of the conditions set forth in CFTC Letter 14-69 of May 12, 2014, with which many Delegating CPOs could not comply.

Practical guidance from experienced financial services lawyers.

Educational research today operates within the context of existing educational institutions, rarely breaking through conceptual and practical barriers to systemic change. But new educational needs, resources and technology demand change in organization and policy. In order to provide adequate educational services we need a new breed of researcher, comparable to the early operational research group, who will contribute multi‐disciplinary skills to systemic analysis and management of education as a whole. From this perspective they may formulate a metasystemic model of education containing a hierarchy of subsystems arranged according to where education occurs. An Educational Development Directorate, by providing continuous analysis of such a model, will feed back to all educational planners the probable effects of their decisions and provide them with alternatives. Such an information system should lead to optimization of resources and genuine alternatives in education.

Mr David Mitchell MP, Parliamentary Under Secretary of State for Industry, has announced a £5 million injection of finance by Barclays Bank for small government‐built factories in the assisted areas of England.

Argues that Canada should follow Australia in forming a one‐stop national securities regulation system. Examines the present system, which is complex, since each province has its own securities commission, with resulting problems for ensuring compliance, attracting foreign issuers etc; it also prevents Canada meeting the aims of the International Organization of Securities Commission (IOSCO) despite the existence of the Canadian Securities Administrators. Presents an alternative proposal to the national system; this is improvement of the existing system by fortifying the CSA, and avoids the risks of establishing a new national system. Explains why this solution is not as good as a national system: there will still be 13 separate commissions, and smaller provinces may not conform to CSA decisions.

The purpose of this paper is to provide a robustness check of the relationship between entrepreneurial activity and economic freedom. As a deliberate “robustness check,” the authors estimated various spatial measures of entrepreneurship found in the research literature, using the same estimator within a consistent model that included political institutions, proxied by the Economic Freedom of North America index. Like many exemplars in the literature, the authors’ focus was on the US states.

The authors estimated models of five different measures of entrepreneurial activity in a model based on Reynolds, Storey, and Westhead (1994).

The authors failed to replicate many of the results found in the literature. The various measures of entrepreneurship were related to different independent variables. Economic freedom was not a consistently significant predictor of entrepreneurial activity.

The empirical work focuses on the US states, and may not be generalizable. By deliberate choice, the authors did not include many of the independent variables, data corrections, or estimation techniques found in the literature. The results imply the need for additional development in the theory that relates institutions to entrepreneurial activity.

To the best of the authors’ knowledge, no one else has “raced,” side‐by‐side, various entrepreneurship measures in a model that includes institutions.