Commissioner Christie’s Concurrence in D.C. Energy, EL18-170

Docket No. EL18-170-000

I concur in today’s order but write separately to express my general interest in the second and, especially, the third points raised in Public Citizen’s Comments filed in response to the Commission’s February 2023 Notice in this proceeding.[1]

As Public Citizen suggested, in response to a petition by the various RTOs and ISOs, the Commodities Futures Trading Commission (CFTC) issued a final order effective April 3, 2013, to exempt, inter alia, FTRs from certain provisions of the Commodities Exchange Act and CFTC regulations.  Whether and how that conclusion may be affected by the record of the years hence are salient questions that deserve more attention. 

In an even broader sense, if there is one lesson taught by the 2008 global financial crisis – largely caused by the implosion of markets in hyper-complex financial derivatives such as credit-default swaps that banking regulators assumed were sound – it is that the extreme financialization of the economy may not be in the interests of anyone except those financial speculators directly profiting from it.  We should not hesitate to ask whether there are some financial derivatives that are so complex that they can never be adequately regulated by any agency.  

That the PJM Independent Market Monitor has questioned whether the FTR market design is efficiently returning congestion costs to consumers, who are supposed to be the ultimate beneficiaries, should be a matter of interest to the Commission.[2]  I look forward to the Commission teeing up these two issues raised by Public Citizen, as well as other issues related to this type of regulation, for more scrutiny in an appropriate procedural vehicle.

For these reasons, I respectfully concur.