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In 2016, the Bureau's issued a report, Building Blocks to Help Youth Achieve Financial Capability: A new model and recommendations, which researched the childhood origins of financial capability and highlighted where and when youth acquire the attributes, abilities, and opportunities to support financial well-being.The Bureau has announced a new report, the Building Blocks Measurement Guide, to provide a means of assessing young people’s progress toward each building block. The Measurement Guide presents age-appropriate questions that program leaders, researchers, and others can use to evaluate a child’s progress toward each of the building blocks. It also presents a list of existing measurement tools that are designed to gather answers to the key questions. The Bureau also posted a handout to help program leaders, teachers, and communities use the Guide.

The Federal Trade Commission has posted a reminder of its workshop to examine cryptocurrency scams at DePaul University in Chicago today, June 25, 2018, from 1-4 p.m. Central Time. A link to the webcast of the event will be added to the workshop page today.

The Federal Reserve has posted the March 31, 2018, lists of minority-owned depository institutions and large domestically chartered commercial banks (consolidated assets of $300 million or more as of quarter end).

The OCC has issued the First Quarter 2018 bank trading revenue report for U.S. commercial banks and federal savings associations of $8.2 billion in the first quarter 2018, which was $3.2 billion, or 62.8 percent, higher than the previous quarter. In the Quarterly Report on Bank Trading and Derivatives Activities the OCC also noted that trading revenue in the first quarter 2018 increased by 15 percent compared with the $7.1 billion reported in the first quarter 2017.

The Hill reports that Judge Loretta Preska of the U.S. District Court for the Southern District of New York ruled on Thursday that the structure of the Bureau of Consumer Financial Protection violates the Constitution, contradicting a ruling issued in January by the Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit. Judge Preska ruled that the entire section of the Dodd-Frank Act that established the Bureau should be stricken, and dismissed the Bureau from a case filed jointly with the New York Attorney General against RD Legal Funding, LLC and others, while allowing the state AG to pursue the case under the Dodd-Frank Act. Preska did not issue an order that the Bureau be shut down.

With opinions on both sides of the question of the Bureau's constitutionality, the matter is more likely to be elevated to the Supreme Court, according to the report, which said that Bureau critics have "long called on Congress to replace the bureau's director with a bipartisan commission."

The Securities and Exchange Commission has announced it has filed charges and obtained an asset freeze against individuals and companies behind a $102 million Ponzi scheme that bilked investors throughout the U.S. According to the SEC’s complaint, the defendants defrauded more than 600 investors through sales of securities in issuers they controlled, including First Nationle Solution LLC, United RL Capital Services, and Percipience Global Corp. The complaint alleges that investors were told that their funds would be used for the companies and some were guaranteed dividends or double-digit returns. However, the defendants spent at least $20 million to enrich themselves, paid $38.5 million in Ponzi-like payments, and transferred much of the remainder in transactions that appear unrelated to the issuers’ purported businesses.

The Securities and Exchange Commission has announced it has charged Merrill Lynch with misleading customers about how it handled their orders. Merrill Lynch has agreed to settle the charges, admit wrongdoing, and pay a $42 million penalty.

According to the SEC’s order, Merrill Lynch falsely informed customers that it had executed millions of orders internally when it actually had routed them for execution at other broker-dealers, including proprietary trading firms and wholesale market makers. Merrill Lynch called this practice “masking.” Masking entailed reprogramming Merrill Lynch’s systems to falsely report execution venues, altering records and reports, and providing misleading responses to customer inquiries. By masking the broker-dealers who had executed customers’ orders, Merrill Lynch made itself appear to be a more active trading center and reduced access fees it typically paid to exchanges.

The FDIC has issued FIL-33-2018 announcing steps intended to provide regulatory relief to financial institutions and
facilitate recovery in areas of Hawaii affected by volcanic eruption and earthquakes.

The Federal Reserve Board has published amendments to Regulation A [83 FR 28526] to increase the interest rates for primary and secondary credit at Reserve Banks and Regulation D [83 FR 28527] to revise the rate of interest paid on balances maintained to satisfy reserve balance requirements and on excess balances maintained at Reserve Banks. The amendments to both regulations are effective today, June 20, 2018, and applicable as of June 14.

The Federal Reserve has released its December 31, 2017, Large Commercial Banks and Minority-Owned Depository Institutions reports.