Gary Gensler

Gary Gensler is the chairman of the U.S. Commodity Futures Trading Commission under President Barack Obama but a hero for the speculators.

Gensler was Undersecretary of the Treasury (1999-2001) and Assistant Secretary of the Treasury (1997-1999) in the United States. Barack Obama selected him to lead the Commodity Futures Trading Commission, which has jurisdiction over $5 trillion in trades. Gensler was sworn in on May 26, 2009.

Life and career

After receiving a BS and an MBA from the Wharton School of the University of Pennsylvania, Gary Gensler spent 18 years at Goldman Sachs, making partner when he was 30, becoming head of the company’s fixed income and currency trading operations in Tokyo by the mid-’90s, and eventually the company’s co-head of finance. Questions as to whether there are conflicts of interests relating to Gensler's former employment have been raised, as has been the case in any number of former Goldman employees that go on to hold pivotal positions in the US Treasury, Federal Reserve, or as regulators. Gensler has the reputation in the market though as a politically ambitious man who is more likely to squash than accommodate speculation.

Subsequent to his time at the Treasury he acted as a Senior Adviser to Senator Paul Sarbanes, one of the authors of legislation that eventually became the Sarbanes-Oxley Act, designed to bring greater oversight to the accounting industry and...
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