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Congress established the CFTC as an independent agency in 1974, after its predecessor operated within the U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA). Its mandate was renewed and/or expanded in 1978, 1982, 1986, 1992, 1995, 2000, 2008, and 2010. The CFTC and its predecessor agencies were established to protect market participants and the public from fraud, manipulation, and other abusive practices in the commodity futures and options markets. After the 2008 financial crises and the subsequent enactment of the Dodd-Frank Act, the CFTC's mission expanded to include oversight of the swaps marketplace.
The Commission administers the Commodity Exchange Act (CEA), 7 U.S.C. section 1, et seq. The CEA brought under Federal regulation futures trading in all goods, articles, services, rights, and interests; commodity options trading; and leverage trading in gold and silver bullion and coins; and otherwise strengthened the regulation of the commodity futures trading industry. It established a comprehensive regulatory structure to oversee the volatile futures trading complex.
On July 21, 2010, President Obama signed the Dodd-Frank Act, which amended the CEA to establish a comprehensive new regulatory framework for swaps, as well as enhanced authorities over historically regulated entities. Title VII of the Dodd-Frank Act, which relates to swaps, was enacted to reduce systemic risk, increase transparency, and promote market integrity within the financial system.
The U.S. futures and swaps markets are estimated at $30 trillion and $250 trillion, respectively. By any measure, the markets under CFTC's regulatory purview are large and economically significant. Given the enormity of these markets and the critical role they play in empowering legitimate, prudential, and non-speculative hedging strategies ensuring that these markets are transparent, open, and competitive is essential to help safeguard the financial stability of the Nation.
In February 2011, the Commission published a new strategic plan, CFTC FY 2011–2015 Strategic Plan (http://www.cftc.gov/reports/strategicplan/2015/index.htm), integrating the expanded responsibilities under the Dodd-Frank Act with its existing mission and goals. The regulation of swaps has been incorporated into the regulatory structure that has existed for futures and options markets. The CFTC has been working to write the rules Congress mandated to regulate the swaps markets, implement those rules, test and adjust those rules, and write new rules as necessary to bring effective regulation to all derivatives markets over the five-year period.
The focused rule-writing effort to complete the remaining 20 percent of rules required by the Dodd-Frank Act remains a tactical goal that has an objective, strategy, and performance measure associated with it. Developing and implementing the Dodd-Frank Act rules is one of the most important and difficult efforts the Commission has ever undertaken. The Dodd-Frank Act set a timeframe of 360 days (or less in a few instances) for completion of the rules, but the Commission was unable to comply with this for several reasons:
The comment and consideration aspects of the rulemaking process take an enormous amount of time. The Commission has and will continue to ensure all appropriate thought is given to rule development.
The Commission is committed to transparency in the rulemaking process. As such, the Commission maintains a list of all of its meetings relating to the implementation of the Dodd-Frank Act, as well as the participants, issues discussed, and all materials provided to the Commission, on its website at http://www.cftc.gov/LawRegulation/DoddFrankAct/ExternalMeetings/index.htm.