476
Opinion of the Court
actions in foreign currencies as a complete exclusion of that commodity from the regulatory scheme, except, of course, to the extent that the proviso for transactions "conducted on a board of trade" qualifies that exclusion. See 7 U. S. C. § 2(ii).
IV
To buttress its reading of the statute, the CFTC argues that elsewhere in the CEA Congress referred to transactions "involving" a particular commodity to describe options or used other "more encompassing terminology," rather than what we are told is the narrower term transactions "in" the commodity, which was reserved for futures, spot transactions, and forward contracts. Brief for CFTC 30-33. Not only do we think it unlikely that Congress would adopt such a subtle method of drawing important distinctions, there is little to suggest that it did so.
Congress' use of these terms has been far from consistent. Most strikingly, the use of the word "involving" in the Treasury Amendment itself completely eviscerates the force of the Commission's argument. After setting forth exemptions for, inter alia, "transactions in foreign currency," the amendment contains a proviso sweeping back into the statute's coverage "such transactions involv[ing] the sale thereof for future delivery conducted on a board of trade." 7 U. S. C. § 2(ii) (emphasis added). As we have already noted, the CFTC agrees that futures contracts are a subset of "transactions in foreign currency." The Commission further submits that the proviso uses the word "involve" to make the exemption inapplicable to those futures contracts that are conducted on a board of trade. This contradicts the "in" versus "involving" distinction. We would expect on the Commission's reasoning that this provision would refer to "transactions in futures." The use of the term "involving" instead, within the very amendment that the CFTC claims embraces
Page: Index Previous 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 NextLast modified: October 4, 2007