Well, position limits are designed to stop excessive speculation, correct?

Excessive speculation leads to markedly increased volatility, what you should expect some market force on real supply and demand to have some influence on.

Everything seems to be rigged for an upward bias.

So for clarity for the American people, either there is or there is not excessive speculation, and we have put forward regulations to prevent the potential for that in the future.

The point is the factual basis of determining excessive speculation needs to be based on something that is concrete, not an aftereffect but something that is concrete.

The whole goal for position limits is to make sure not anybody is manipulating the market, correct?

So the point I am making is we had position limits on those commodities, yet we saw tremendous swings, tremendous increased speculation, and tremendous increased volatility.

If this is not a global regulatory scheme on commodity pricing, what you have done will have no significant effect.

That futures markets cannot function without speculators who make markets, provide liquidity for hedgers, aid in price discovery, and take risks.

I want to thank Senator Levin for holding this hearing today. He has been a leader for years in Congress on efforts to better understand and monitor commodity markets.

The most recent version of the rule was rushed through the Commission and applied across the board to 28 separate commodities.

It is our obligation in Congress to make sure regulators act in the public interest, based on facts and data, rather than reflexively placing restrictions on unpopular market participants.

Of a transparent market.

Madam President, this is a straightforward amendment on a program that fails 70 percent of the time. We spend $35 million a year. It has an abject failure rate. Only 30 percent of it results in anything positive happening; 70 percent of…

Madam President, what the Senator from Maine just said is that $4.2 million is going to be unsuccessful and $2.8 million might be. The fact is that with a $1.3 trillion deficit and a $15 trillion debt, we can't continue to do this no…

This violates everything in the American value; that we value the individual person.

So if we have the right regulations in place, we have a zero tolerance policy, we have the options in the toolbox, suspension and debarment, what is holding us back to actually enforcing this on contractors and subcontractors so we can…

The reason I say that is I have talked to some military personnel coming back as well and saying that is a standard.