Gary Gensler, chairman of the Commodity Futures Trading Commission (CFTC), has such a complicated job that he even has trouble explaining it to his mother.
Speaking today to a room full of activists and reporters as part of Public Citizen’s 40th anniversary speaker series, Gensler was asked about translating the jargon of the complex world of derivatives and the CFTC and making it accessible to the average person. He admitted that it’s hard to do, even when talking to his own family.
“My 84-year-old mother asks me, ‘What do you do down there?’ ” Gensler said, smiling.
The best way he can describe it, he said, is that the CFTC is “the cop on the beat.”
Gensler spoke for about 45 minutes, describing the agency’s role post-financial crash (increasing market transparency and oversight) and discussing the need for agency funding. In the 1990s, he said, the agency had 632 staffers. A decade ago that number shrank by 25 percent, but now it is back up to 675 people. Their task is a critical one, he said: To implement key parts of the Dodd-Frank financial reform bill.
Tyson Slocum, director of Public Citizen’s Energy Program, asked Gensler how regulation can tamp the rampant speculation that is driving up oil prices. Gensler’s answer: Making the swaps marketplace more transparent (in the works) and reinstating position limits in energy markets (a rule is proposed).
As the people dispersed, Slocum presented Gensler with a box containing petition signatures of nearly 12,000 activists who called on the CFTC to end Wall Street domination of the energy futures market.
Gensler, who during his remarks repeatedly spoke of the importance of transparency, replied that he was pleased they would become part of the public record.
Don Grey
From the way banks and many other financial institutions are being ALLOWED to operate in America one would assume that words like “Fraud, fraudulent, defrauding, forgery hasn’t been added to the definition for the phase “corporate business model”. Racketeering, Gangsters, has become a common term when referring more and more to Corporate CEOs. We also now have Oil Slicks used to refer to “oil speculator, or oil industry executives”. Or how about the word “Lapdog” replaceing words like President, Congressmen, Legislator. The corporate lapdogs, our congressmen are those who are being lobbied today to pass laws to stop consumers from being allowed to sue companies, foreign or domestic, for fraud, racketeering, stealing, lying, or in the case of the medical industry even causing the death of a consumer. But now the consumer is learning, in the case of the Oil Slicks, that we’re being “legally” screwed, and we know now that their lapdogs no longer work for us. Fraud anymore is just another word for doing business in America.
May 10, 2011 at 8:49 pm
Karen Doulin
If the CFTC can’t take oil and gas futures off speculative markets, why don’t we have a petition to push for congress to pass a law to that effect. Isn’t it up to congress and the President?
May 10, 2011 at 9:08 pm