Ms. Melissa Jurgens
Secretary
Commodity Futures Trading Commission
Three Lafayette Centre
1155 21st Street, NW
Washington, DC 20581
Re: Reopening of Comment Periods – Position Limits for Derivatives (RIN 3038-AD99) and Aggregation of Positions (RIN 3038-AD82)
Dear Ms. Jurgens:
The International Swaps and Derivatives Association, Inc. (“ISDA”)1 and the Securities Industry and Financial Markets Association (“SIFMA”)2 support the Commodity Futures Trading
Commission’s (the “CFTC” or “Commission”) continued efforts to evaluate the unintended impact that its rulemakings, promulgated pursuant to the Dodd-Frank Wall Street Reform and Consumer Protection Act (“Dodd-Frank”)3, are having on market participants. Similarly, we support the Commission’s efforts to revisit and refine those rules where necessary. These efforts are particularly important in the context of ensuring that the goals of Dodd-Frank, including the goal to bring lower costs and greater flexibility to end-users, are not lost in the implementation effort. We specifically support the Commission’s decision to host a public roundtable to consider additional viewpoints on its proposed rulemakings for position limits (the “Position Limits Proposal”)4 and aggregation (the “Aggregation Proposal”),5 and we appreciate the opportunity to submit this comment letter in response to the Commission’s decision to re-open the comment period for the two outstanding proposals.6
As discussed herein, we agree that the Commission must take a careful and deliberate approach to issues related to (i) physical commodity hedges; (ii) the process for providing nonenumerated exemptions from the position limits rules; (iii) spot-month limits and a conditional exemption; and (iv) the aggregation rules.
In connection with supporting the decision to re-open the comment period on the Position Limits Proposal and Aggregation Proposal, we similarly endorse the measures that the ommission has taken to (i) mitigate the burden of the recordkeeping rules in CFTC Regulation 1.35(a),7 and (ii) expand the scope of counterparties that will be available for utility special entities when entering into utility swaps.8