NORTH CAROLINA BANKING INSTITUTE Volume 22 | Issue 1 Article 19 3-1-2018 Grandfathered into Commerce: Assessing the Federal Reserve's Proposed Rules Limiting Physical Commodities Activities of Financial Holding Companies Patrick Conlon Follow this and additional works at: http://scholarship.law.unc.edu/ncbi Part of the Banking and Finance Law Commons Recommended Citation Patrick Conlon, Grandfathered into Commerce: Assessing the Federal Reserve's Proposed Rules Limiting Physical Commodities Activities of Financial Holding Companies, 22 N.C. Banking Inst. 351 (2018). Available at: http://scholarship.law.unc.edu/ncbi/vol22/iss1/19 This Note is brought to you for free and open access by Carolina Law Scholarship Repository. It has been accepted for inclusion in North Carolina Banking Institute by an authorized editor of Carolina Law Scholarship Repository. For more information, please contact
[email protected]. Grandfathered into Commerce: Assessing the Federal Reserve’s Proposed Rules Limiting Physical Commodities Activities of Financial Holding Companies I. INTRODUCTION When the Deepwater Horizon’s oil pipe broke open in the Gulf of Mexico, millions of people watched the underwater camera showing BP’s oil pumping into the ocean.1 BP neither owned, nor operated the rig that exploded and sank after killing eleven people.2 Still, that oil spill has gone down in history as the “BP Oil Spill.”3 BP spent nearly $62 billion to resolve the legal claims associated with the event and to restore goodwill and its reputation.4 But what if instead of the BP Oil Spill, it had been the Morgan Stanley Oil Spill?5 Morgan Stanley and Goldman Sachs are the only two financial holding companies (“FHCs”) who benefit from a provision of the Gramm-Leach-Bliley Act of 1999 (“GLBA”), which allows qualifying FHCs to engage in the extraction and transport of physical commodities.6 In general, commodities trading by FHCs must be deemed 1.