The CFTC adopted a very important rule today to ensure customer accounts cannot be looted. But the rule will only be effective if it can be enforced and Congress has refused to provide the CFTC with enough funding to do its job.   “Without funding, the CFTC simply does not have enough cops on the beat to patrol the high-crime area that Wall Street has become,” said Dennis Kelleher, president of Better Markets, a nonprofit organization that promotes the public interest in the financial markets.

The CFTC is charged with policing the $600 trillion swaps market where bad bets have led to customers losing their money and taxpayers picking up the bill. It is also supposed to examine the 125 brokers and merchants that handle futures trades, like MF Global, but lack of funding has forced the CFTC to outsource that duty. The rule is good, but not enough.  “As the wait to find the missing $600 million to $1.2 billion in MF Global’s customer funds enters its fourth week with no end in sight, the CFTC must be fully funded to do its job to prevent this and other scandals from happening again,” Mr. Kelleher said.