Wall Street Reform And Consumer Protection Act Of 2009

Floor Speech

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Mr. LUCAS. I thank the gentleman.

Madam Chairwoman, I rise in support of the Peterson-Frank amendment. It represents a year-long attempt to balance the needs for stronger regulation and a need to manage legitimate financial risk.

Under this amendment, end users will not be regulated as though they were a major financial house residing on Wall Street. They are not systematically risky, they did not cause the financial collapse, and they should not be regulated as if they did.

Not all concerns, however, have been resolved. And I would have preferred language that would have made clear only those that can cause a significant, adverse impact on the U.S. financial system to be regulated as major swap participants.

For that purpose, I am supporting Congressman Murphy's amendment that we will see shortly to cure that deficiency.

Similarly, I don't understand why market makers that only deal in cleared products need to have additional capital and margin requirements imposed on them by the Federal Government.

Instead, this amendment allows the appropriate financial regulator to more closely monitor the markets and those that may accumulate or generate too much risk for a healthy and robust financial system. It then gives the regulators the appropriate tools to reduce the risk before it can negatively affect our economy.

I have other concerns about this amendment. I am sure we would all do things differently if we could. This amendment isn't perfect, but it is a marked improvement over other legislative efforts either proposed or considered. This amendment is worthy of our support.

Now I will also admit, unfortunately, all of the hard work that went into the creation of this amendment may very well be overwhelmed by the massive overreach of the rest of the bill, but we should vote for and support this amendment.

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