The head of the U.S. commodities regulator said on Tuesday that he is working on a broad package of proposals for possible new rules governing high frequency trading, which has been blamed for increasing market volatility. Commodity Futures Trading Commission Chairman Gary Gensler said he had a designed a broad package of potential rules, which address some of the dangers of high-speed trading, and he hoped to put it before the commission "shortly." "We've seen our markets change quite fundamentally in terms of the participation," he said, adding that market participants' direct electronic access to exchanges had changed the composition of the marketplace from one dominated by noisy humans to a silent space in which machines can complete trades in less than a second. "As regulators, we owe it to the American public to try to stay abreast of that," Gensler said, speaking on the sidelines of the Securities Industry and Financial Markets Association's annual conference.
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