Customer Protection and End User Relief Act

Floor Speech

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Ms. DeLAURO. Mr. Chairman, I will include for the Record a document from the Institute for Agriculture and Trade Policy, and I rise in strong opposition to this bill. To cater to special interests, it deliberately weakens the essential regulatory and oversight functions of the Commodity Futures Trading Commission, and it fails to address the CFTC's biggest challenge--its flawed funding mechanism.

Simply put, this bill is a recipe for another disaster on Wall Street, like the one that caused the Great Recession. Americans want to see more accountability from big banks and oil speculators and fewer reckless transactions, market failures, and bailouts. That is what the CFTC's job is, to rein in gambling with risky derivatives on Wall Street and prevent undue speculation on oil.

Unfortunately, this bill goes in the wrong direction. It includes provisions that will make it harder for the CFTC to regulate derivatives transactions between the United States and foreign banks. It goes out of its way to impose new hurdles and litigation risks to prevent the Commission from doing its job. It fails to address the CFTC's flawed funding mechanism, hamstringing its ability to create fair and transparent derivatives and futures markets.

The CFTC is the only financial regulator that is completely dependent upon the general fund to provide for its operations. Every other financial regulator--SEC, FDIC, FHFA, the list goes on--collects user fees.

Fixing this structural flaw has been proposed by every President since Ronald Reagan. It is all the more important since Congress greatly expanded the CFTC's responsibilities 4 years ago in response to the bad behavior that precipitated a devastating financial crisis.

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