“In the weeks ahead, federal regulators will finalize rules that, done right, will bring long-overdue transparency and oversight to the multitrillion-dollar derivatives market. The big banks that control derivatives trading, however, are lobbying to dilute the rules. To grasp what is at stake, recall that the $182 billion taxpayer bailout of American International Group during the financial crisis was essentially a bailout of the global financial system, undertaken to make good on derivatives bets gone spectacularly wrong.

Since then, financial regulators in the United States, particularly at the Commodity Futures Trading Commission, have put several rules in effect under the Dodd-Frank financial reform law to rein in derivatives. But a pair of reforms now before the C.F.T.C. are arguably the most important of all.”

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