The big fight has started between the CFTC and everyone else about regulations to control speculators and finally slow down the frenetic futures market.

Unless the Obama administration is just blowing smoke with its vows to regulate credit-default swaps and the like. Maybe Barack Obama's team is deeply divided about regulating the markets. Maybe the Commodity Futures Trading Commission really will try to regulate derivatives. Or maybe this is just a sop for public consumption.

Gary Gensler, new chairman of the CFTC, announced the possibility of new rules to regulate derivatives. The little agency supposedly regulates "$5 trillion in daily trading of futures contracts including transactions for crude oil, foreign currency and agriculture products." All he said was that he plans to holding hearings to see whether regulations are needed. But that's enough for the big investment firms to start huddling with their vast array of lobbyists and sympathetic pols on a battle plan. (And enough to get the Wall Street Journal to say that "commodities regulators ... plan to propose sweeping trading limits.")

Maybe. Maybe not.

Gensler didn't even say when the hearings would start or who would testify.

The little agency that thinks it can has finally fired up its boilers and started chugging toward the top of a steep hill.

Or is it? Gensler himself is a former Goldman Sachs partner and, thanks to Matt Taibbi's entertaining screed on Goldman, we have a fresh take on that vampire squid.

Gensler was criticized during his confirmation hearing in March for his "deregulatory orientation." In fact, it was pointed out that Gensler fought nine years ago (as a Treasury official under Bill Clinton) for exempting those deadly credit-default swaps from even being regulated by the CFTC.

Just in case Gensler is serious now about regulation, the big Wall Street firms are serious about stopping such nonsense. More importantly, there are major players inside the Obama administration — like Larry Summers — who also want the CFTC to veer off the tracks.

For background, you only have to go back to late May for "Credit Crisis Cassandra: Brooksley Born's Unheeded Warning Is a Rueful Echo 10 Years On."

Brooksley Born is the former CFTC chair who tried like hell to regulate derivatives but had the steam taken out of her by the likes of Alan Greenspan, who actually told her (she recalls) that "there wasn't a need for a law against fraud because if a floor broker was committing fraud, the customer would figure it out and stop doing business with him."