[Congressional Record Volume 160, Number 99 (Tuesday, June 24, 2014)]
[Extensions of Remarks]
[Pages E1061-E1062]
From the Congressional Record Online through the Government Publishing Office [www.gpo.gov]




              CUSTOMER PROTECTION AND END USER RELIEF ACT

                                 ______
                                 

                               speech of

                         HON. CHRIS VAN HOLLEN

                              of maryland

                    in the house of representatives

                         Monday, June 23, 2014

       The House in Committee of the Whole House on the state of 
     the Union had under consideration the bill (H.R. 4413) to 
     reauthorize the Commodity Futures Trading Commission, to 
     better protect futures customers, to provide end users with 
     market certainty, to make basic reforms to ensure 
     transparency and accountability at the Commission, to help 
     farmers, ranchers, and end users manage risks to help keep 
     consumer cost low, and for other purposes:

  Mr. VAN HOLLEN. Mr. Chair, I support reauthorizing the Commodity 
Futures Trading Commission, CFTC, and believe a properly resourced CFTC 
has a critical role to play in promoting fair and transparent markets 
that effectively serve end users and consumers without putting 
taxpayers or our financial system at risk. Unfortunately, H.R. 4413 
departs from this vital objective in several important ways.
  First, Title II of H.R. 4413 imposes onerous new administrative 
burdens on the CFTC whose practical effect will be to delay the 
Commission's ongoing Dodd-Frank rulemaking and encourage costly 
litigation. We need more certainty--not less certainty--when it comes 
to regulating our derivatives markets, and H.R. 4413 would take us in 
precisely the opposite direction.
  Second, Title III of H.R. 4413 would make it much more difficult for 
the CFTC to regulate cross-border derivatives transactions that pose a 
risk to the U.S. economy. The legislation creates this vulnerability by 
substituting foreign derivatives rules for U.S. law unless the CFTC and 
the Securities and Exchange Commission, SEC, jointly determine that a 
foreign country's regulatory regime is not broadly equivalent to our 
own. While I support international efforts to harmonize effective rules 
of the road for derivatives transactions, I do not support presuming an 
equivalency in this area that does not currently exist. Six years after 
unregulated derivatives transactions contributed to the sharpest 
downturn in our economy since the Great Depression, we simply cannot 
afford to outsource the protection of our financial system to foreign 
regulators.
  Third, neither this legislation--nor the FY 2015 House Agriculture-
FDA Appropriations bill, which proposes to slash the CFTC's budget by 
22 percent below the President's request--does anything to provide the 
CFTC with the resources it needs to police fraud and excessive 
speculation in our derivatives markets on behalf of end users and 
consumers.
  For these reasons, I urge a ``no'' vote on H.R. 4413.

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