Washington (Platts)--14Jan2011/447 pm EST/2147 GMT

The Commodity Markets Council claims the US Commodity Futures Trading Commission is running through its financial regulatory reform rulemaking at a pace that industry cannot keep up with and using reform as an excuse to implement new rules outside the scope intended by law.

In a letter Friday to US Representative Darrell Issa, a California Republican and chairman of the House Committee on Oversight and Government Reform, CMC President Christine Cochran wrote that while it is difficult to quantify the impact of financial reform, the CFTC is moving too fast to implement the mandates under the Dodd-Frank Wall Street Reform and Consumer Protection Act.

Cochran wrote that CMC "is concerned that the adoption of unnecessary rules or the adoption of rules without sufficient deliberation will result in policies that hamper market efficiency, tie up capital and constrain job growth."

The letter was in response to a letter Issa sent out last month to more than 150 companies, trade groups and research organizations seeking input on government regulations that were negatively impacting US business.

Issa is one of the four co-sponsors of legislation US Representative Michele Bachmann introduced on January 5 to repeal Dodd-Frank, which requires, among other mandates, the CFTC to regulate the over-the-counter derivatives market.

In their letter, however, CMC wrote that the timeframe for the CFTC to implement these reforms "is so tight, the quantity of rules so large and the subject matter so complex, the industry is simply overwhelmed."

"With this kind of volume and speed, the industry and the regulatory agency are so overwhelmed and simply not capable of providing the thoughtful comments the CFTC needs to implement sound public policy," CMC wrote.

CMC also claimed the CFTC is using the rulemaking process to implement regulations that are "overly prescriptive" and go beyond Dodd-Frank requirements and pointed to the imposition of position limits in commodity and swaps markets without evidence proving their necessary.

CMC accused the CFTC of using the rulemaking "as an opportunity to propose unnecessary and extremely prescriptive regulations on already regulated derivatives markets."

"These markets were not the cause of the 2008 financial crisis," CMC wrote.

--Brian Scheid, brian_scheid@platts.com

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