MF Global's bankruptcy has become a central focus in Congress. While the firm's collapse was the eighth-largest bankruptcy in U.S. history, what is most troubling to lawmakers is how some $1.2 billion in customer funds and collateral went missing as the firm fell apart.
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Joanne Morrison is the deputy editor of Futures Industry . Before joining the magazine in August 2008, Joanne was a senior economic correspondent at Reuters, covering a broad range of issues regarding financial markets and the global economy.
In the final weeks of 2011, the Canadian Parliament brought an end to a 70-year old pricing and marketing system that has kept the bulk of Canada's wheat producers from using futures markets.
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Joanne Morrison is the deputy editor of Futures Industry . Before joining the magazine in August 2008, Joanne was a senior economic correspondent at Reuters, covering a broad range of issues regarding financial markets and the global economy.
During the final three months of 2011, the Commodity Futures Trading Commission held several open meetings to finalize rulemakings required by the Dodd-Frank Act. Among the rules that were finalized were speculative position limits, real-time reporting of swaps transactions, amended rules for the investment of customer funds by futures commission merchants, registration requirements for foreign boards of trade, and core principles for derivatives clearinghouses. The agency issued an order extending the effective dates for certain rules by six months and asked for public comment on a process for determining when a swap is "made available to trade." In addition, the agency issued guidelines for complying with the reporting requirements for large positions in commodity swaps as well as an interpretation of the term "actual delivery" as used in a provision of Dodd-Frank that exempts retail commodity contracts from CFTC oversight.
The following article describes the CFTC's rulemaking actions in reverse chronological order, starting with the rules approved at the agency's last meeting of the year.
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Will Acworth and Joanne Morrison are editor anddeputy editor of Futures Industry .
