It is particularly outrageous, at a time when every U.S. consumer is feeling the impact of high energy prices, to allow lobbying by a small group of vested interests to influence Congress to take these markets out of the public eye and create an advantage for people to trade on private, proprietary systems lacking the protections of a neutral self-regulatory organization. Policy makers, regulators, and the American public will be deprived of currently available information on market participation, concentration, and financial performance.
This is not only a matter of ill-conceived public policy but is also anti-competitive and directly contrary to the recommendations made by the President'sWorking Group on financial markets.
Even House members who voted in favor of the bill have been publicly quoted as saying that it must be changed in the Senate.
The New York Mercantile Exchange plans to fight adamantly at the Senate level to demand that this subsection either be eliminated or be amended to create a consistent regulatory policy for electronic and open outcry markets.
