Fed Re-examines 2003 Approval of Banks’ Commodities Trading

The Federal Reserve, facing lawmakers’ criticism of Wall Street’s trading in physical commodities, said it’s reexamining a decade-old policy governing the firms’ activities.

The Fed “regularly monitors the commodity activities of supervised firms and is reviewing the 2003 determination that certain commodity activities are complementary to financial activities and thus permissible for bank holding companies,” Barbara Hagenbaugh, a spokeswoman for the central bank, said today in a statement. She declined to elaborate.