No news may be good news on the swap margin front, as two bills—one ensuring swap margin requirements aren't imposed on corporate end users and the other exempting inter-affiliate swap transactions from being treated like market-facing trades—move through committee toward a House vote. Banking regulators and the Commodity Futures Trading Commission last April proposed imposing swap margin requirements on swap dealers, major swap participants and other financial entities.

They explicitly said that the regulations would not be imposed on nonfinancial end users, but financial institutions would be permitted to impose margin requirements on their clients.

That's raised a ruckus among derivatives end users, which see the language as a back-door attempt to impose margin requirements on them, even though the rules' authors have said that was not the intent.