Comment Text:
Please do all you can to limit speculation in the stock market. As you know, speculators with enough available capital to use as leverage can skew the markets badly, and, when they do that, we individual investors and unwitting professional investors end up on the losing end of what we thought was an unrigged trade.
The mega-banks, such as Goldman Sachs and Citigroup, are even now rigging the marketplace hugely in their favor at the expense of their own clients. They were doing the same thing early in this century, and, when they over-reached, our government used taxpayer money to bail them out. You may recall that Goldman Sachs bet against the clients they had sold mortgage-based derivatives to as healthy investments. Then when the market for those derivatives failed, and they became almost worthless, the first bailout money to AIG [billions of dollars] went from AIG immediately to Goldman Sachs as insurance payments.
Most of the U.S. mega-banks seem to feel any profits should go to them while the U.S. taxpayers take on all the risks.
Greed of that magnitude should be constrained. CFTC is in a position to help protect, to some extent, the American taxpayer and investors who think they're trading in a fair, i.e. an un-rigged, market. Please do all you can to prevent speculators from rigging the markets hugely in their favor.
