This week, the House Agriculture Committee heard testimony from Michael Selig, the Chairman of the Commodity Futures Trading Commission. Many of the questions focused on farmer’s access to trading and pricing data, and enforcement of insider trading on prediction markets.
This week, the House Agriculture Committee heard testimony from Michael Selig, the Chairman of the Commodity Futures Trading Commission. Many of the questions focused on farmer’s access to trading and pricing data, and enforcement of insider trading on prediction markets.
Transcript
This week, the House Agriculture Committee heard testimony from Michael Selig, the Chairman of the Commodity Futures Trading Commission. Many of the questions focused on farmer’s access to trading and pricing data, and enforcement of insider trading on prediction markets.
Rep. David Rouzer, R - OH: “Your testimony highlights on, agriculture markets or your testimony highlights, agriculture markets and how CFTC can improve. You specifically mentioned working on timely publishing of reports and data. So the market has the best information possible. Can you speak about your goals with the commitment of traders Report and how it would help improve the market?”
Michael Selig, Chairman, Commodity Futures Trading Commission: “Absolutely. I think this is a really important issue to our agricultural community. I've met with many farmers, ranchers and producers who feel that they don't have access to the transparent information that they need. We, of course, are producing these reports and generating reports on a daily basis, but we only publish them on a weekly basis. And so we are evaluating, whether to start pushing these out on a more frequent basis.”
Rep. Jim Baird, R - IN: “How is the how is the, CFTC ensuring these markets remain transparent, liquid and free of manipulation?”
Michael Selig, Chairman, Commodity Futures Trading Commission: “Congressman, we take this responsibility very seriously. We've got to comprehensively surveil our derivatives markets, whether it's markets for digital assets, grains, metals or anything else. We don't discriminate on the product. We're making sure that the markets are well surveilled, and we're policing fraud, manipulation, insider trading and all of these markets.”
Rep. Shontel Brown, D - OH: “Do you think you have sufficient guardrails to address insider trading?”
Michael Selig, Chairman, Commodity Futures Trading Commission: “Yes. In terms of insider trading, our statutes are very clear. We have very broad authority to police for fraud, manipulation and insider trading. And we are building out our surveillance capabilities to be able to more effectively police in these markets. In terms of the newer markets like prediction markets, we've entered into a memorandum of understanding with the Major League Baseball, organization and will continue to enter into agreements with other leagues and participants to ensure that we have all the information we need to adequately place these markets.”
For Market to Market, I’m Peter Tubbs
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