On the recordJanuary 12, 2017
As I close, I want to remind us of the need to act today. But before I do, I also want to thank the ranking member. While we may vote differently on this bill, he and I generally work well together on a myriad of issues that face not only production agriculture, but rural America as well, and I thank him for his work, even though we may not vote exactly the same way today. Over the past 4 years, the Committee on Agriculture heard dozens of witnesses about the upheaval end users have been facing while trying to use derivative markets in the wake of the post-crisis financial reforms. While this Congress took affirmative steps in Dodd-Frank to protect end users from harm, today it is clear that there is still work to be done. have been facing while trying to use derivative markets in the wake of the post-crisis financial reforms. While this Congress took affirmative steps in Dodd-Frank to protect end users from harm, today it is clear that there is still work to be done. It isn't enough to simply raise these issues and hope that the CFTC will take care of them for us--for one, sometimes they cannot. There are numerous small oversights in the statute that have big implications for end users that we must correct in this legislation. Currently, the CEA defines some utility companies as financial entities, stripping them of their status as end users. The Commission can't fix this.…
