Law Commons^™

The Exchange-Trading Requirement Of The Commodity Exchange Act, William L. Stein

Vanderbilt Law Review

The Commodity Exchange Act (CEA) makes it illegal to trade a contract for the purchase or sale of a commodity for future delivery-a"futures contract"-unless the contract is executed on a federally designated exchange. Despite its long history of trouble-free administration and operation, this central premise of futures regulation recently has been attacked as unworkable and undesirable. Some argue that the requirement discourages commercially useful off-exchange transactions. They claim that even if such transactions fall within the letter of the requirement, off-exchange transactions do not implicate the trading restriction's policy concerns. In contrast, others suggest that off-exchange

transactions threaten the safety …