“Since the second Trump administration's come into place, there's been 2,500 self-certifications that have been submitted into the Commodity Futures Trading Commission. Not one of them has been denied. Now, how can it be that not one of them has been denied?”
Odd Lots · Money & Markets · October 2026
Joe Weisenthal asked CME's chief whether there are still any financial rules, given the spread of prediction markets and offshore crypto products. Duffy says it feels like a "ready, fire, aim" moment, and points to contracts such as one on a hot-dog eating contest as easy to manipulate.
Transcript
…and so forth. And there's all these new instruments, offshore instruments that people can access via crypto and so forth. The impolite, impolitic question is like, are there any laws anymore? Because it feels like that. It really feels like that. Are there still financial regulations and laws?
It's worrying that was the workshops.
Yeah, yeah. It does feel a bit of a ready-fire aim strategy going on right now where anything can go. And so it's very disconcerting. I'll give you a couple of statistics which really trouble me. Since the second Trump administration's come into place, there's been 2,500 self-certifications that have been submitted into the Commodity Futures Trading Commission. Not one of them has been denied. Now, how can it be that not one of them has been denied? So when you look at somebody's prediction markets, I've made fun of them and people say, well, you please stop bringing this up. I bring up, they approved a contract on predictions on Nathan's hot dogs. How many hot dogs did Joey Chestnut? He died. I have to ask, what's the economic impact of that contract being out there? And how is it not in violation of core principle three, which is…
a good balance of regulation, not to have no regulation. No regulations
on borrowed time. There's no question about it. Always has been, always will be. So, you know, what's going on right now at the agency, they are circumventing basically acts of Congress and they are making rules and regs that are associated whether it's at the CFTC or SEC. Well, I remind market…
Devil's advocate question, but the prediction markets would respond that, like, well, you know, insider trading on the platforms, maybe it's a good thing because you get informational value from it and everyone benefits from having this informational value. I'm not sure there's much informational…
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