John Damgard, the president of the Futures Industry Association, today issued the following statement in response to the release by the Obama administration of a white paper outlining a number of reforms to the U.S. financial regulatory system.
“We welcome the Obama plan to plug the gaps in financial market supervision and prevent a crisis of the magnitude that we have seen over the last year. Although much work remains to be done on the details of the administration’s proposals for regulatory reform, we commend the administration for the thoughtfulness and comprehensiveness of its plan for building a “new foundation” for financial regulation and supervision.
Over the last two years, the U.S. futures markets have functioned extremely well despite extraordinary turmoil in the financial system. No customer money was lost through default and no taxpayer money was used to support the futures business. We believe this reflects the strengths of our regulatory system as well as the effectiveness of the industry’s own practices for limiting counterparty risk and maintaining confidence in market integrity.
We look forward to working with the administration, the Congress and all regulatory agencies to do everything we can to promote and enhance the liquidity, risk management, price discovery and financial integrity of futures trading in the United States.”