Public Statements & Remarks

Opening Statement, Meeting of the Commodity Futures Trading Commission

Chairman Gary Gensler

April 27, 2011

Good morning. This meeting will come to order. This is a public meeting of the Commodity Futures Trading Commission to consider issuance of a proposed rulemaking under the Dodd-Frank Wall Street Reform and Consumer Protection Act regarding:

    • Capital requirements for nonbank swap dealers and major swap participants;

    • Segregation of customer collateral for cleared swaps;

    • Product definitions, a joint rule with the Securities and Exchange Commission; and

    • Conforming amendments to certain CFTC regulations.

In addition, the Commission will consider aligning the comment period on the margin rule that was proposed on April 12 to the comment period for the capital rule.

I’d like to welcome members of the public, market participants and members of the media to today’s meeting, as well as welcome those listening to the meeting on the phone or watching the live webcast. We look forward to receiving public comments on the proposed rules that we are considering today. The rules, as well as fact sheets and “Questions and Answers” documents, will be posted on our website shortly. This is the fourteenth public meeting to consider Dodd-Frank rulemakings.

At this point, as we have have substantially completed the proposal phase of our rule-writing to implement the Dodd-Frank Act, I want to take this opportunity to thank the staff for all of their extraordinary work. Similarly, I also thank Commissioners Mike Dunn, Jill Sommers, Bart Chilton and Scott O’Malia for all of their hard work during this process. The Commissioners and their staffs diligently evaluated all of these proposals and provided insightful comments that made the documents stronger.

Since the President signed the Dodd-Frank Act last July, the Commission has promulgated rules covering all of the areas set out by the Act for swaps regulation, with the exception of the Volcker Rule, for which the Act set a different timeline.

With the substantial completion of the proposal phase of rule-writing, the public now has the opportunity to review the whole mosaic of rules. This will allow market participants to evaluate the entire regulatory scheme as a whole. To further facilitate this process, this morning we will consider reopening or extending the comment periods for most of our Dodd-Frank proposed rules for an additional 30 days.

Specifically, for rules for which the comment period has closed, the comment period would be reopened for 30 days. For those rules for which the comment period is still open, but is scheduled to close before 30 days from the day this notice would be published in the Federal Register, the comment period would be extended to 30 days from the date of publication. All other comment periods would be unaffected.

This time will allow the public to submit any comments they might have after seeing the entire mosaic at once. As part of this, I am hopeful that market participants will continue to comment about potential compliance costs as well as phasing of implementation dates to help the agency as we go forward with finalizing rules. One opportunity will be next week’s two-day staff roundtable to hear from the public on the best schedule of implementation dates for the effective dates of final rules.

Before we hear from the staff on the rulemakings that we will consider today, I will recognize my fellow Commissioners for their opening statements.

Last Updated: April 27, 2011