Southwest Airlines Co. complained for months in Washington that rules designed to curb excesses of the finance industry were hurting companies far from Wall Street.

Southwest lobbied regulators, wrote letters to lawmakers, and testified at a congressional hearing that new safeguards for the swaps market were increasing its fuel costs by as much as $60 million a year. The agency that could do something about it, the Commodity Futures Trading Commission (CFTC), refused to budge.

This month CFTC Chairman Timothy Massad, who succeeded Gary Gensler's acting replacement in June, gave Southwest the break it wanted. The move pleased the Dallas-based company and some of the agency's critics on Capitol Hill.

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