Political Quotes

“I thank Mr. Peterson and Mr. Conaway, with whom I did serve on the Agriculture Committee with for a number of years, and I recall well some of the discussion and debate as Chairman Gensler appeared before the committee on article 7 of the Dodd-Frank Act. Although, I didn't author that position, former-Senator Dodd is a constituent of mine. So I guess that is close enough to the work that was done creating this section. Again, let's be very clear about what this amendment does. It is not about clarifying anything. It is about stripping from the law article 7 of Dodd-Frank, which was a congressional mandate to establish position limits for speculative trading. Again, this was not done in a vacuum. It was done because there has been an explosion of speculative trading that is taking place in commodities markets. We had testimony in the Congress back in 2010 that it had grown from 22 percent to 67 percent speculation on Wall Street. Goldman Sachs--when, again, we were dealing with close to $4 a gallon for gas--had a report which said that 27 percent of that price was due to speculation. So, Congress appropriately instructed CFTC to come back with a regulatory plan to limit speculative positions in a reasonable way. Again, no one quarrels with the fact that end users, whether it is farms, ranchers, airlines, or businesses of all sorts, should be able to exercise options in market swaps.…”