Political Quotes

“because I believe that this legislation represents a missed opportunity to modernize the regulation of our Nation's futures and securities markets, I am unable to sign this conference report. Section 13106 of the conference report directs the members of the President's Working Group on Financial Markets, the Secretary of the Treasury, the Chairman of the Board of Governors of the Federal Reserve, the Chairman of the Securities and Exchange Commission, SEC, and the Chairman of the Commodity Futures Trading Commission, CFTC, to work to ensure that by September 30, 2009, the SEC and CFTC take action under their existing authorities to permit risk-based portfolio margining for security options and security futures products. Depending on when this bill is approved and signed into law, the agencies would have roughly 16 months to achieve this directive. Because the SEC and CFTC have a fundamental disagreement over how to proceed, there is no guarantee that a legislative directive to reconcile their differences will yield a breakthrough in what has become a long-standing turf battle between the two agencies over this issue. Chairman Frank, Mr. Kanjorski and I proffered a solution to this regulatory impasse during conference that would create a clear pathway the agencies must follow in order to realize a state-of-the-art portfolio-based margining system for customers of broker-dealers.”