keep learning, keep moving

By Murray Coleman

A report this afternoon by Dow Jones Newswires’ Jessica Holzer notes that the collapse of a $1.1 trillion Senate budget measure late Thursday could leave two key regulatory bodies without enough funding to carry out reforms.

The Securities and Exchange Commission and the Commodity Futures Trading Commission were supposed to get big funding increases so they could implement new reforms under the Dodd-Frank legislation, the report notes.

The SEC was supposed to get $1.3 billion and the CFTC’s budget was to expand by $117 million under the Senate measure.

“They simply will not be able to do that effectively with the number of people they have,” Annette Nazareth, an ex-SEC commissioner, told the newswires.

Regulators have been working on a number of fronts to reform financial services, ranging from complicated and often opaque derivatives markets to reducing speculative investments by banks. Goldman Sachs (GS) is winding down its principal strategies group and J.P. Morgan (JPM) is shifting its proprietary traders to the asset management unit.

The CFTC has been active in looking into commodities ETFs and related exchange-traded products. It has considered how investors use popular precious metals funds like the SPDR Gold ETF (GLD). Regulators have also reportedly been watching as providers rush to come out with more physically backed commodities funds, such as those proposed by BlackRock (BLK) and others.

In a related development, Reuters reports today that insurance lobbyists are ramping up to fight regulators from imposing new rules on agents providing financial advice.

http://blogs.barrons.com/focusonfunds/2010/12/17/report-sec-cftc-regulators-left-without-enough-funding-to-carry-out-reforms/?mod=wsjcrmain