CHICAGO FUTURES LEADER SAYS MARKETS CAN ADAPT Foreign currency futures markets would not be harmed if the leading industrial countries agreed to restrict currency movements to within a narrow band, said Leo Melamed, chairman of the Chicago Mercantile Exchange's, CME, executive committee. "The target zone would not affect our market I think at all.... A 10 pct range in the Deutsche mark gives us a healthy market," Melamed told Reuters in an interview. "We were willing to live in the old Smithsonian era with a four pct shift," he said, referring to permitted currency fluctuations in the early 1970s. "One thing you can adjust is to make each contract a larger value." As chairman of the CME in 1969-71, Melamed was instrumental in the development of currency futures, which now are crucial to the Chicago exchange. Melamed said capital flows -- which he estimated can approach 200 billion dlrs a day -- would overwhelm efforts by governments to control currency fluctuations. "They can do it for a day, in terms of intervention, an hour, a week maybe, but not over a period of time. So it's unrealistic and it doesn't work and it's unnecessary." The CME's top policymaker also said a decision by the exchange to advance the quarterly settlement time of its stock index futures contract to the morning from the afternoon would help eliminate dramatic price gyrations in futures and equity markets on so-called "triple-witching" day. "We think that the settlement in the morning will have a salutary effect so that over a longer period of time I think this issue (triple witching) will go away because of the change in the structure as of next June," when the move is scheduled to go into effect, he said. Melamed said proposed changes in floor practices by traders of the popular Standard and Poor's 500 stock index future would address complaints of trading abuses and stimulate trading. Two weeks ago, the CME board of directors proposed barring brokers on the top step of the pit from trading for their own account. The board also proposed requiring brokers engaged in dual trading elsewhere in the pit to record personal trades to the nearest minute and curbing trading between broker groups. The changes "will in time have an extremely positive effect on the marketplace. That's going to prove very, very instrumental in increasing volume over time," he said, predicting the increase would come within a year. Melamed, also chairman of Dellsher Investment Co Inc, said the CME last week withdrew a proposal to put a 12-point limit on the S and P 500 index's daily price movement when the Commodity Futures Trading Commission told the exchange it could not be a temporary program. The CME also received "many negative comments, many more than we anticipated," Melamed conceded. Many futures commission merchants predicted sell orders would accelerate in the event the price approached the bottom limit.