Congress takes aim at CDS market

Congressman Barney Frank's loudly-voiced desire to regulate the credit default swaps market dovetails nicely with the effort already in-place by the Fed to push the industry to an exchange. Reuters reports that Frank wants "sensible" regulation--is there any other kind?--of the CDS market and will raise the issue when the new Congress meets in 2009. By then, we should have a clearer idea of how efforts by the likes of the CME-Citadel and The Clearing Corporation are faring. We will likely see a few more competitors emerge. An actual CDS exchange of course assumes some sort of built-in regulatory apparatus, like FINRA. It's fair to say that the market is on the cusp of some big changes that will have a profound impact on systems, but it's still very unclear exactly how all this will shake out.

For more:
- here's the Reuters article

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