In between touting the Intercontinental Exchange’s new forex offering and Russell contract transition, ICE Chairman and CEO Jeff Sprecher offered some thoughts about the current Wall Street crisis at the Profit and Loss Forex Network conference in Chicago today.

“This is clearly a global crisis that we’re under. Volatility has been the order of the day, or for many FX traders, the order of the year,” Sprecher said of the current Wall Street crisis, adding that the job of exchange leaders is to “install as much confidence as our circumstances will allow and address the reality of the situation while working to provide solutions as quickly as we can.”

Post-Wall Street meltdown, Sprecher said that increased regulation in currency and commodity trading was “almost a foregone conclusion.” He urged conference attendees to speak up during the regulatory debate because “the stakes for all of us are enormous.”

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The Consumerist blog picked up on something that immediately came to my mind upon news of the Fed’s $85 billion bailout of insurance giant AIG – that AIG’s recently-aired ads are suddenly hilarious.

When news of AIG’s pending collapse hit earlier this week, I immediately thought about those commercials with the annoyingly precocious children hailing the rock-solid status of the insurer. Merrill Lynch’s old ad slogan “Bullish on America” also became a punchline after Bank of America purchased it on Monday.

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