What Farming and Banking Have in Common

Goldman Sachs (GS Quote) is the third largest donor to Senate Agriculture Committee Chairman Tom Harkin (D., Iowa) over the course of his career, while giant agricultural conglomerate Archer Daniels Midland (ADM Quote) is number six, according to OpenSecrets.org.

This fact might seem odd to lay folk, but the agriculture committees in the Senate and the House of Representatives actually matter a lot to Wall Street banks like Goldman, Morgan Stanley (MS Quote) and JPMorgan Chase (JPM Quote) that have large derivatives trading operations.

That is because the agriculture committees oversee the Commodity Futures Trading Commission, which regulates futures markets like CME Group (CME Quote) and IntercontinentalExchange (ICE Quote).

Though there is widespread support for a merger of the CFTC and the Securities and Exchange Commission, which oversees stock exchanges like NYSE Euronext (NYX Quote) and Nasdaq OMX Group (NDAQ Quote), there appears to be no hope of that actually happening, Washington observers say.

"You'd be hard-pressed to find anyone who doesn't think combining the SEC and CFTC wouldn't be a plus," says Brian Cartwright, former SEC general counsel. "But you'd be hard-pressed to find anyone knowledgeable about Congress who believes that outcome is likely."

That's because the House and Senate agriculture committees don't want to give up campaign contributions from big financial firms, says Marc Lackritz, a lecturer at Georgetown University and former president and CEO of the Securities Industry and Financial Markets Association, Wall Street's main lobbying organization.

"They fight tooth and nail to maintain that jurisdiction, notwithstanding the fact that 90% or 92% of all futures now are financial; they're not agricultural," Lackritz says.