US and EU enter new era

Washington DC -- According to speakers at a mid-May hearing in the US House of Representatives, the US and the EU are entering into a new era of co-operation on financial services regulation, spurred on by Basel II, the EU's Financial Services Action Plan (FSAP), and the US's Sarbanes-Oxley Act .

In January, the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) formed a co-operative framework to work with the Committee of European Securities Regulators (CESR), according to Ethiopis Tafara, director of the Office of International Affairs at the SEC. The CESR provides the European Commission with technical advice and implementation muscle as that body develops new EU-wide securities regulation as part of the FSAP. "The SEC-CESR dialogue will have two goals," says Tafara. "The first will be to