The "Enron loophole" exempts most over-the-counter energy trades and trading on electronic energy commodity markets from government regulation.
[1] The "loophole" was enacted in sections § 2(h) and (g) of the Commodity Futures Modernization Act of 2000, signed by U.S. president Bill Clinton on December 21, 2000.
[1] It allowed for the creation, for U.S. exchanges, of a new kind of derivative security, the single-stock future, which had been prohibited since 1982 under the Shad-Johnson Accord, a jurisdictional pact between John S. R. Shad, then chairman of the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission, and Phil Johnson, then chairman of the Commodity Futures Trading Commission.
6124, the Food, Conservation, and Energy Act of 2008, also known as "The 2008 Farm Bill".
Senator Barack Obama blamed the "Enron loophole" for allowing speculators to run up the cost of fuel by operating outside federal regulation.