On the recordJune 14, 2011
I rise to associate myself with the fine efforts of Congresswoman Rosa DeLauro and Ranking Member Sam Farr to point out the anemic funding that is contained in the base bill for the Commodity Futures Trading Commission. The Republican bill reduces below the President's request by 44 percent the necessary funding for staff for the Commodity Futures Trading Commission and provides significantly fewer resources for the agency to do the job America expects. Now, why is this important? The CFTC is supposed to regulate betting, B-E-T-T-I-N-G, because really what's going on is all the American people know is a very sophisticated type of gambling that when the bettors lose, rather than absorbing their losses, they come to the American people, but they're very powerful and they create new mechanisms. They create mechanisms. They don't call it betting, but they have a term, ``collateralized debt obligations.'' That gives it a kind of luster. And from that, they might drive a credit default swap. But in the end, as the book by Joe Nocera, ``All the Devils Are Here,'' recounts what we really have is a Wall Street and a Chicago futures market that has run amok, where market manipulation, speculation, and outright fraud led our country into the worst economic recession since the Great Depression. Make no mistake about it: These folks are very powerful, and one of the most important trades involved in this very sophisticated gambling is oil.…
