Press Releases

Washington, D.C. - Today, House Agriculture Committee Chairman K. Michael Conaway issued the following statement after the Energy and Environmental Markets Advisory Committee (EEMAC), an advisory committee of the Commodity Futures Trading Commission (CFTC), released a report recommending the regulator abandon its plans to limit the number of futures contracts a trader can hold on certain commodities.

“I want to commend the members of EEMAC for their work on this important report. The House Committee on Agriculture has heard many of these same concerns, and I firmly believe that Congress did not intend to harm end-users access to hedging tools with the enactment of Dodd-Frank.

“Congress asked EEMAC to produce a report sharing the concerns of market participants with the Commission and the report fulfills both the letter and the spirit of the law. The CFTC leadership needs to take a hard look at the report EEMAC produced and focus on responding to the real, substantive concerns raised by the very firms and end-users who are engaged in those markets.

“I want to thank the Commission for fulfilling its statutory obligation under Section 751 of the Dodd-Frank Act. It is surprising to me that anyone would complain about a federal agency following the law, but maybe it’s a case of the old adage: ‘If the facts are against you, argue the law. If the law is against you, argue the facts. If the facts and the law are against you, yell like hell.’ While the report may be critical of the proposed position limits rulemaking, it is important that it is not simply dismissed out of hand because the conclusions it reached are inconvenient.”

Congress created EEMAC specifically to “submit reports and recommendations” and to “serve as a vehicle for discussion and communication on matters of concern to exchanges, firms, end users, and regulators regarding energy and environmental markets and their regulation by the Commission.”