Treasury's legislative proposals on OTC derivative trading sent to Congree

Opinion piece from FT.com:

“Through higher capital requirements and higher margin requirements for non-standardised derivatives, the legislation will encourage substantially greater use of standardised derivatives and thereby will facilitate substantial migration of OTC derivatives onto central clearing houses and exchanges,” says the Treasury.

Paul Hamill, a director in Credit Trading at Barclays Capital, says: “Liquidity will determine how the market settles on a concept of what is a standard contract and therefore can be cleared.

If you do not understand the high priority this legislation needs, how these contracts have been traded & what they did to the global economy & will do again; and, you have money invested "for the long term", you should worry.

Why?

You wouldn't give someone you don't know thousands of dollars without doing your due diligence about whether you'd get paid back or not.

You wouldn't buy a used car/truck from someone you didn't know sight unseen without a test drive .

So it's pretty simple, if you do not understand the macro risks to your long term investments, you shouldn't "blindly" throw money in it hallucinating that "the market will come back like it has in the past".