In February, the Monetary Authority of Singapore, the country's main financial regulator, began a consultation on a proposal to require that the trading of certain over-the-counter derivatives take place on organized markets such as exchanges. The proposal would apply to interest rate swaps denominated in U.S. dollars, Euros and pounds sterling, and only to transactions where both counterparties are banks with more than S$20 billion (US$15 billion) in notional value of OTC derivatives booked in Singapore for each of the last four quarters. MAS estimated that this would cover about 80% of the local market in these interest rate swaps.
