CFTC Struggling to Utilize Current Swap Market Data

After a year of swap data reporting, the Commodity Futures Trading Commission (CFTC) is yet to be able to make any sort of headway on the swap market data it has been collecting, leaving the nearly $700 trillion dollar industry no safer than it was before the 2008 financial crisis.

Among a list of reasons for this given by CFTC Commissioner Scott O’Malia during an event, O’Malia mentioned inconsistent reporting and technological issues as major pain points.

As it stands right now, the CFTC receives its swaps market data from several different swap data repositories (SDRs). Each SDR receives more than 60 million messages per week and have no uniform way of organizing this data, making it impossible for the CFTC to automate their data aggregation.

Without automation, the CFTC has to have two economists working fulltime solely to put together their weekly swaps report.

Outside of swap market data reporting issues, the CFTC’s budget is severely limiting the regulator’s ability to analyze data. The CFTC is notoriously underfunded, and is currently unable to update its technology in order to properly manage all the data it is receiving.

The CFTC will be receiving little sympathy from market professionals however, as many had warned that the CFTC was rushing through its rule implementation, and had mandated the reporting of data before having an idea of what data they would need or the best way to collect it.

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