FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE 
DATE: November 15, 2011

CONTACT: John Carey at 202-466-1854
john@ourfinancialsecurity.org

AFR Statement on News Reports of CFTC Budget Freeze

Washington, DC – Americans for Financial Reform, a coalition of more than 250 national, state and local organizations working together for strong Wall Street reform, issued the following statement today:

Lisa Donner, Executive Director of Americans for Financial Reform:

“News reports indicate that House-Senate conference committee is cutting the administration’s $308 million budget request for the Commodity Futures Trading Commission (CFTC) by one-third, to $205.3 million, a near funding freeze.  This leaves the agency without the funding it needs to do its job and will make it impossible to implement key aspects of financial reform. This is not just a budget question: this is a question of whether Washington is serious about bringing oversight and reform to Wall Street at all.

With news about inadequate oversight of MF Global fresh in our minds, and the lasting effects of the 2008 financial crisis causing sustained hardship across the country, it is outrageous that Wall Street special interests appear to be succeeding in this rollback of financial reform.

The CFTC role in oversight of financial markets is vital. The CFTC oversees the commodity markets that set the prices for the milk and eggs we buy at our grocery store. With the passage of the Dodd-Frank Act the agency will also oversee the majority of the complex derivatives markets that helped crash our economy in 2008. The Dodd-Frank Act assigned massive new markets to CFTC oversight, leading to a 7 fold (600 percent) increase in the size of the CFTC’s supervisory responsibilities. Yet the funding level just advanced by the Conference Committee would barely allow the CFTC to expand its current oversight resources and would not permit the agency to implement its new responsibilities.

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