Tag Archives: CFTC

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AFR Press Statement: News Reports of CFTC Budget Freeze

“News reports indicate that House-Senate conference committee is cutting the administration’s $308 million budget request for the Commodities 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.”

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Coalition Press Statement: Consumer Federation of America – Wall Street’s Oil Speculation Clobbers Main Street’s Consumers

The oil price spike of the past year, which saw gasoline prices increase by over a dollar from the summer of 2010 to the summer of 2011, will drive household expenditures on gasoline to a record average of $2900 this year. Crude oil is about $30 higher than costs or historic trends justify, generating needlessly high prices for petroleum products that will drain about $200 billion out of the economy.

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AFR’s Comment Letter Regarding Stable Value Contracts

Read AFR’s comment letter in response to regulators posing the questions of whether stable value contracts meet the definition of swaps in the Dodd-Frank Act, and, if so, whether they should be regulated as swaps or given an exemption. The letter points out that stable value contracts have the characteristics of swaps and also pose some of the same risks as swaps do. It does not take a specific position on whether stable value contracts should be subject to all swaps regulation, but does urge regulators to address these dangers by extending business conduct standards to issuers of stable value contracts and also to ensure that issuers of financial guarantees have sufficient resources to back up their promises.

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AFR to CFTC: Margin and Capital Requirements Comment

The CFTC’s proposed rules on margin and capital requirements must be substantially strengthened. Specifically, the process of collecting margin must be generally improved, both in terms of quantity and quality required. The suggested revisions would not only improve the overall effectiveness of the rules, but also the fairness, as the proposed rules seems to favor swap dealers.

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AFR Comments on Proposal to Reopen Derivatives Regulations

AFR submitted a comment in response to the CFTC’s request for views on their overall proposed structure for regulating swaps and derivatives. The comment raised several issues concerning conflicts of interest in ownership and management of key areas of derivatives infrastructure, like clearinghouses and swaps data repositories. AFR also raised potential problems with definitions of “commercial risk” that could permit evasion of regulations.