In the dead of night November 14, the movement to hold big banks accountable for their crimes took two major hits. Occupy Wall Street activists were swept from Zuccotti Park as radical members of Congress moved to gut funding for the Commodity Futures Trading Commission (CFTC) and advance a series of shocking proposals to roll back financial reform.
Midnight Madness
On Capitol Hill, a similar rout was taking place in the dead of night. In a fast move that deals a serious blow to a key regulator in charge of Wall Street derivatives trading, Obama's budget request for CFTC was cut by more than a third by GOP legislators eager to kill any oversight of Wall Street.
According to Politico, the administration had sought $308 million for the new fiscal year, but the amount is expected to come in closer to $205 million.
Better Markets, a Wall Street watchdog group, explains the problem this way:
The derivatives market is $600 trillion big and much of that market is controlled by just 4 Wall Street megabanks: JP Morgan Chase, Citigroup, Bank of America and Goldman Sachs. Who is the watchdog for those derivatives? The CFTC has responsibility for most of them and it is getting a budget of only $205 million. They will not be able to hire the people or buy the technology that they need to keep up with Wall Street, never mind actually keep watch over them to try to prevent another financial catastrophe.
Crippling the CFTC is, of course, part of the GOP plan. As CFTC has moved this year to bring transparency to dark markets and crack down on commodities speculation, the tiny agency has been a lightning rod for right-wingers who opposed the 2010 Dodd-Frank reforms.
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