(Corrects with date of Tobin’s death in ninth paragraph.)

July 30 (Bloomberg) -- The Commodity Futures Trading Commission is examining ways to curb price swings in energy markets. Chairman Gary Gensler says the CFTC must “address excessive speculation, not how we can eliminate speculation.”

That’s akin to hoping to become a bit pregnant, rather than bearing children or remaining a virgin. In the craziness of these recession-plagued days, though, populist ranting against the alleged evils of the trading community gets a sympathetic hearing even when the talk shifts from sensible, practical safety buffers to philosophically impossible partitions.

Why stop at energy speculation? There are a zillion financial markets out there that could be thrilling to the sound of post credit-crunch stable doors being slammed shut. Here are a handful of ideas that our newly vigilant overseers might consider implementing in their zeal to keep us safe from the rampaging scavengers of finance.

(a) Inequitable Equities

You have a bright business idea to build a better widget, so you rent an office and a photocopier and install a secretary, hire a workforce and develop a company. At some point, once the cash is rolling in, you decide it would be nice to monetize your success by taking the company public and listing shares on an exchange. Equity investors beg your bankers to let them participate in the offering of Widgets Inc.

These people are vultures, profiteering from the fruits of your intellect and the hard work of the people you employ. They are just like energy speculators betting on the price of oil, with zero interest in the physical activity of sucking crude out of the ground and distributing it around the world, and nothing real at stake in whether oil prices rise or decline. They know nothing, care little about your widgets, and are only interested in their own piggybacking paper profit. In short, they are accursed speculators.

Stock-exchange rules should oblige investors who want to take a stake in a company to show up for work there at least one day a month as proof of their commitment. Speculators clearly are the main perpetrators of the wild stock-market swings that drove the global market value of companies down to about $39 trillion currently from as high as $62 trillion at the peak in December 2007; they must be stopped.

(b) Currency Cads

About $3.2 trillion of currency trading takes place every single day on the foreign exchange market, according to the most recent figures from the Bank for International Settlements. Sure, some of that is Aunt Agatha swapping her dollars for dong before embarking on her summer adventures in Vietnam, and there’s a contribution from Widgets Inc. bringing home its overseas earnings.

Most of the market participants, however, have no underlying business to speak of, and are only interested in how much money they can make pushing currencies higher and lower. In short, they are accursed speculators.

The authorities could kill two birds with one stone. They could raise some much-needed revenue, and deter those pesky speculators, by introducing the tax proposed back in 1971 by Nobel Prize-winning economist James Tobin. Thirty years ago, central banks were struggling to control monetary policy after the collapse of the Bretton Woods system of pegging currencies. So Tobin, a professor emeritus of economics at Yale University before he died in March 2002, proposed a tax on currency trading, say 0.05 percent, to deter what he himself termed “speculators.”

Destroying the most liquid market in the world -- daily trading in London and North America dropped by more than a quarter in April from a year earlier, according to figures this week from the Bank of England and the Federal Reserve Bank of New York -- would be a small price to pay to defeat those accursed speculators.

(c) Bondage for Bonds

The U.S. government bond market is where the Treasury turns to raise all the money it needs to shovel into the bonus pools that are so essential for Keeping America Great by Supporting Its Rich Investment Banking Guys. There’s a net $1.9 trillion of debt needing to find buyers in the current fiscal year that ends Sept. 30, according to Goldman Sachs Group Inc.

This year, though, the yield on the 10-year Treasury has climbed from a low of 2.2 percent in January to about 3.6 percent currently. Who is responsible for this outrageous increase in borrowing costs, sapping the lifeblood of the world’s largest economy? It must be those accursed speculators.

The fixed-income market is far too important a resource to be messed around with by anyone who doesn’t have America’s best interests at heart. Henceforth, anyone who wants to buy and sell Treasuries should be forced to register as a Primary Dealer. Hey, if it’s good enough for Nomura Holdings Inc., Jefferies Group Inc. and RBC Capital Markets, all of whom joined the gang this year, it’s good enough for any non-speculator.

(Mark Gilbert is a Bloomberg News columnist. The opinions expressed are his own.)

To contact the writer of this column: Mark Gilbert in London at magilbert@bloomberg.net

Last Updated: July 30, 2009 10:02 EDT