U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission chairman Harvey Pitt and Commodity Futures Trading Commission chairman James Newsome have pledged to modernize rules relating to futures products.

Pitt and Newsome expressed confidence that they would promptly achieve consensus on remaining issues to allow futures to trade in a fair and competitive manner at the earliest possible date, while avoiding regulatory arbitrage between the options and futures markets.

They also noted that they are committed to ensuring customer protection and encouraging innovation and new product development quickly.

They committed their agencies to work toward final rules relating to margin on these products, as well as rules relating to protection of customer funds, that would allow trading of security futures by early in the second quarter 2002.