No Insider Trading Rules?

I found the information in this article useful.

It appears there are no "insider trading" restrictions within the CFTC regulations except with respect to employees. Is there any wonder why all of the products "created" over the past few years have been products NOT traded on any open exchange?

From the article bit below...

Participants also debated concerns about harmonization when it came to insider-trading prohibitions.
Annette Nazareth, a former Democratic SEC commissioner, said she wants to see such prohibitions when it comes to commodities futures, modeled after how such restrictions exist in the securities market.
"The Commodity Exchange Act generally contains no such ban, other than for CFTC and market employees, largely because one of the historical functions of the futures markets was to permit hedgers to protect themselves against risks to the commodity positions based on their own knowledge of those positions," Nazareth said.
However, the CFTC's Chilton said he "wasn't so sure" about bringing the insider-trading ban to the commodity futures regulator.
CBOE's Brodsky said both agencies could impose insider-trading restrictions so long as a particular rule on insider trading applies only to a particular product and not broadly across all sectors.
Some officials testifying expressed concern about whether insider-trading prohibitions should apply to broad-based indexed products as opposed to individual products.
With lots of derivatives, Brodsky said, there is no transparency or reporting requirements, giving many investors the opportunity to do a wide variety of insider trading.
CFTC's Gensler pointed out that the agencies as well as the White House and Congress are working on legislation that would bring these products, both over-the-counter and exchange-traded, under regulation. "We are working on record keeping, reporting and other regulations for derivatives," he said.
Clearinghouses
Clearinghouses, which are intermediaries between buyers and sellers, should have agreements among themselves, based on a common set of principles agreed to by the agencies, so that no problematic products slip through the cracks, said Anthony Leitner, director at A.J. Leitner & Associates.

I especially like the remark by Anthony Leitner. It reminds me of the remarks by Bernanke and Paulson when they started in their new jobs while still having their feet in their prior ones where they suggested point blank that the banking industry was sophisticated enough to gauge its own risk profiles and thus could create it's own guidelines and needed little "meddling" from the Fed or government as to how to manage risk capital ratios. These words were being spoken as the entire financial system was stretched over 30-1 and beginning to implode in 2006.

Fed Urges Secrecy on Banks in Bailout Programs

The out right insult of the title here, the headline in a Reuters article today is indicative of how bad the folks running the Fed are. From their insistence as far back as 2006 that the Trillions of dollars in Insurance Protection floating on unregulated markets would not harm the greater economy to their indiscriminate bail out of multiple unregulated companies while allowing many of them to become banks under accelerated application processes to their obvious ignorance of market mechanisms whereby allowing savvy institutions to rake in Billions in profits from the various Fed programs to float debt and buy back debt (print money) to the absolutely unconscionable allowing of financial and non-financial firms to float Private Debt with direct Public Backing through the FDIC to the complete take over of the consumer and mortgage credit markets to the tune of a couple Trillion Dollars...

Now they want total secrecy. The Fed is paranoid and incompetent and they are "spending" taxpayer money with abandon (flooding the banks with cash through buybacks of debt) while supporting without oversight firms they deem "to big to fail" at the same time they and the FDIC continue to encourage the building of more institutions that are "to big to fail" all the while inviting "private equity" and other unregulated non "financial" firms to buy into their tottering financial system.

Where does this end??? I have had it with these guys and our legislators are complete incompetent, impotent wimps with no backbone to deal with the Fed. Where are they in all this discussion?

From the Article

* Fed urges judge not to enforce order pending appeal
* Banks say disclosure could cause loss of confidence
By Jonathan Stempel

NEW YORK, Aug 27 (Reuters) - The U.S. Federal Reserve asked a federal judge not to enforce her order that it reveal the names of the banks that have participated in its emergency lending programs and the sums they received, saying such disclosure would threaten the companies and the economy....

Preska (Chief Justice Loretta Preska) said the Fed failed to show that revealing the names would stigmatize the banks and result in "imminent competitive harm." The Fed asked the judge not to require disclosure while it readies an appeal.
"Immediate release of these documents will cause irreparable harm to these institutions and to the board's ability to effectively manage the current, and any future, financial crisis," the central bank argued.

It added that the public interest favors a delay, citing a potential for "significant harms that could befall not only private companies, but the economy as a whole" if the information were disclosed.

Give me a break. At this point does it matter? We all know the firms that almost went under, the ones that are technically insolvent and only operating because of the accounting changes instituted early this year. There is no "news" to be revealed in disclosing this other then for the Citizens of this Nation to have the right to see how the Washington Financial Elite bailed out the Wall Street Financial Elite after their House of Cards came crumbling down.

Give me a BREAK!!