Action Alert: Let’s Avoid Another Financial Crash!
November 17th, 2011
Ask your Members of Congress to increase funding for the Commodity Futures Trading Commission
Rapid action is needed to get Congressional funding for the Commodity Futures Trading Commission – the agency set up to prevent another financial meltdown. The Senate has found money for other programs, but is severely underfunding the CFTC. Please use the link provided here to email your Senators to ensure that we avoid another financial crisis: http://bit.ly/slq116
Why does this threat to the CFTC’s funding matter? Without enough money, the government will not be able to implement the financial reforms passed last year and Wall Street banks will continue to gamble dangerously, once again placing the entire global economy at risk.
Background:
Your action is required to help avoid another financial crash. We received very bad news on November 15 when the House-Senate conference committee released its proposed budget for 2012; unfortunately this budget fails to include the needed increase in funding for the Commodity Futures Trading Commission (CFTC), the agency that manages derivatives markets, the central cause of the financial meltdown.
The president requested an increase in the CFTC’s budget to $308 million because if financial reforms are implemented, the size of the market regulated by the agency will expand seven fold (from hundreds of billions of dollars to hundreds of trillions of dollars.) The proposal from the conference committee is to ignore the CFTC’s new responsibilities and maintain its budget at $205 million.
Without an increase in funding, financial reforms passed last year cannot be implemented and Wall Street banks will continue to gamble dangerously, placing the entire global economy at risk once again.
A couple of examples of programs whose funding was increased include:
- NASA: Funding will grow by about $155 million above current levels. The agreement preserves $529 million for a new space telescope project that had been not funded in the House bill.
- Environmental Quality Incentives Program (EQIP): This positive-sounding project is set to receive a whopping $1.4 billion even though much of the money will be used to clean up massive lakes of manure created by confined animal feeding operations (CAFOs). Many environmental and farming groups ask why taxpayer money should be used to clean up these messes. See a New York Times article on this here. http://www.nytimes.com/2008/01/13/business/13feed.html
Clearly the additional money needed for full CFTC funding can be found within a multi-trillion dollar budget. Comprehensive financial reforms are crucial in order to avoid another global financial meltdown. Saving pennies by starving regulatory agencies today will only lead to much more expensive crises in the future.
This alert was created collaboratively with the Tri-State Coalition for Responsible Investment and the Intercommunity Peace and Justice Center.
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Related keywords: action alert, budget, cftc, financial reform
