A Republican proposal to place the reforms under the Dodd-Frank Wall Street Reform Act on hold until foreign regulators implement comparable regulations came under fire at the Commodity Futures Trading Commission (CFTC).

“While I appreciate and agree with those that want to ensure regulatory reforms are drafted in an appropriate fashion and not done in a hasty manner due to stringent timetables, legislation to delay the Dodd-Frank Wall Street Reform and Consumer Protection Act is not needed in my opinion,” said CFTC Commissioner Bart Chilton in response to Sen Orrin Hatch’s (R-UT) letter to Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner.

In the letter sent Friday Hatch, the ranking member of the Senate Finance Committee, wrote, “While I support well reasoned efforts to strengthen our financial system, if implementation is rushed, the administration risks crippling our financial institutions by making them uncompetitive.” Dodd-Frank calls for the CFTC to implement regulatory reforms by mid-July, but the agency is not expected to meet the deadline.

Chilton agreed that while it was important to implement regulatory reforms “correctly,” but he said they were also “time sensitive.” Hundreds of trillions of dollars in trading remain completely unregulated, he noted. “It is exactly this ‘dark’ trading that helped lead to a hideous bailout paid for by taxpayers” in late 2008.

“While regulatory agencies may not be able to make every deadline required under the reform bill because we want to fine-tune such rules and regulations, the urgency Congress has already placed on getting reforms implemented is just as important today as it was when this…legislation became law,” Chilton said. Dodd-Frank was signed into law by President Obama last July (see Daily GPI, July 22, 2010).

In November CFTC commissioners expressed concern that the agency was moving too quickly in approving proposed rules to implement Dodd-Frank. They also have had reservations about the apparent lack of harmonization between some of the rules proposed by the CFTC and those proposed by other domestic regulators and foreign regulators (see Daily GPI, Nov. 22, 2010).

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