It’s about time something is being done about the futures market. They are a large part of why gas prices are so high.
If that’s true, then these speculators are going to lose their shirts when the price of oil plummets. There is no way that Congress can fix this.
A speculator who buys low and sells high will increase the prices of goods when they are below average and decrease them when they are above average, thus reducing market swings. This is a good thing, and the speculator will profit by it.
A speculator who buys high and sells low will increase market swings, which is bad, but he'll pay dearly for the privilege.
While there may be some swindlers who are good at convincing other speculators to throw away huge amounts of money, I can't see any way that speculators as a whole would be destabilizing the market absent a major source of outside funding. Soros et al. may be playing games, but if anything anti-speculation rules would allow worse market manipulation to be done more cheaply.