That accounted for 12 percent of the $26 trillion market for U.S. CDS. And ICE Trust Europe, a related company that is wholly owned by Intercontinental but includes member banks such as BNP Paribas and Nomura, cleared $1.2 billion in CDS trades.

If the Senate ever gets around to passing the clearinghouse requirement, ICE Trust US market share could explode. The big banks that belong to ICE Trust US control more than 90 percent of the U.S. market, according to the Comptroller of the Currency. And they will have the ability to steer business to their clearinghouse and profit from it.

At an operating level, ICE Trust US is just what the administration ordered, although the ownership structure already has caused some objections in Washington. Its main rival in the U.S. is the CME, in Chicago, which has yet to get off the ground. Right now, member banks can choose whether they want to put a trade on a clearinghouse. But if that becomes a matter of law, at least the banks will own the clearinghouse. That ownership structure is already raising concerns.

"You don't want clearinghouses to be captives of organizations that have incentives to keep products off," the clearinghouse, Democratic Senator Jack Reed told Reuters in an interview in January. He wants to limit a financial institution’s ownership of a clearinghouse to 20 percent. But that limit probably wouldn’t have any effect on ICE Trust US, because no single bank owns more than 20 percent.

It’s no surprise that potential rivals aren’t thrilled about ICE Trust US, either. "The dealer motivations continue to be quite clear. They have no interest in any transparency, and they're trying to limit the regulation as much as they can," NYSE Euronext CEO Duncan Niederauer said at a conference in June.

Pretty much everyone agrees that putting derivatives trades on a clearinghouse is a good idea and that it will reduce systemic financial risk. It isn’t a perfect cure: There are deals in the derivatives market—which includes everything from CDS to ordinary stock options and hog-belly futures—that are one of a kind and don’t fit into a clearinghouse system because there is no price history.

But much of the $600 trillion derivatives market can be cleared. And that will help the financial system because clearing establishes public prices and sets limits on the amount of debt financing that derivative traders can use. And, critically, members of a clearinghouse are responsible for one another’s losses. That means they are likely to set limits on one another, and in the event of a catastrophe, the odds of a public bailout are reduced.

“As the AIG situation has made clear, massive risks in derivatives markets have gone undetected…. Today, to address these concerns, the Obama administration proposes a comprehensive regulatory framework for all over-the-counter derivatives,” the Treasury Department said on May 13, 2009. It said that the Commodity Exchange Act and the securities laws should be amended to require clearing of all standardized over-the-counter derivatives through regulated central counterparties, or clearinghouses.

Nearly one year later, the administration is a long way from making sure that derivatives are traded through a clearinghouse whenever possible. And even if that requirement does become law, the big banks that created the derivatives crisis may well end up managing the process—and profiting from it too.