swaps execution facilities. I had an important contribution to make to the discussion.
Preventing me from attending was an ethics rule adopted by the Obama administration. It bars senior and cabinet-level administration officials from speaking at events sponsored by a former employer unless said official receives a waiver. The idea is to prevent senior officials from using their government office to benefit a former firm by appearing at that firm's events to drive attendance and admission fees.
I thought I would easily qualify for a waiver. First, I was never a paid employee of the WMBAA, only an unpaid, voluntary board member.
Second, the ethics rule in question, by its terms, applied only to executive branch agencies, not independent agencies like the CFTC. Although I had signed a pledge to comply with the rule because Obama personnel staff had asked me to, the underlying order was never intended to reach officials serving in non-executive branch, independent agencies like the CFTC.
Third, at my request, the WMBAA had not announced my attendance at SEFCON V and, therefore, my appearance could not have boosted paid attendance.
Finally, I was both an outspoken supporter of the Dodd–Frank reforms that created the SEF rules and one of the most knowledgeable government officials available to address the industry.
Still, I had signed the waiver, I was relatively new to my post, and once the White House says no, it is exhausting to find the relevant official and make an appeal on short notice. We needed a workaround.
I called my staff together, including my cautious and savvy chief of staff, Jason Goggins; legal counsel, Amir Zaidi; and senior legal counsel, Marcia Blase. Ever meticulous, Marcia explained how several weeks before she had inquired about obtaining a White House waiver with the CFTC's Chief Ethics Officer, a former Obama administration lawyer who had helped craft the pledge itself. That lawyer had seemed optimistic about getting the waiver, according to Marcia, but now, with four business days to go, the White House had surprised us with a “no.”
My staff was upset. Jason, especially, was spoiling for a fight. He wanted to challenge the CFTC Ethics Officer by demanding written confirmation of the White House denial. Marcia recounted her conversation with the ethics lawyer. My head hurt. I needed to take my own counsel. I said I would step out, get a sandwich, and that we should reconvene in an hour.
I strode through the hall of the CFTC’s ninth-floor executive suite past the black-and-white photos of a dozen former agency chairs and then, further down the hall, past the living color photos of the current commissioners. I rode the elevator down to the red marbled lobby of the CFTC headquarters and walked past the uniformed security guards before the large etched-glass CFTC seal. I exited the building onto 21st Street in Northwest Washington—an area north of Foggy Bottom and south of Dupont Circle.
Returning to a lifelong habit of peripatetic processing of important information, I began to walk fast. I headed north on 21st Street across New Hampshire Avenue. The neighborhood quickly changed from modern rectilinear glass office blocks to hexagonally flared, flower-boxed Victorian residences. I paced onward toward Massachusetts Avenue and turned left on Embassy Row. I walked past the Cosmos Club,11 where I had lived for six weeks the summer before while looking for an apartment.
I saw no upside to wasting time trying to reverse the denial of the waiver. The issue was how to deliver my message. The speech was ready. It was good, and it was important. It would be my first major speech on US soil as a CFTC Commissioner. It was an important opportunity to define myself and my agenda to a critical audience of peers in the New York financial community. I intended to reiterate my pro-reform credentials as a supporter of the swaps trading provisions of Title VII of the Dodd–Frank Act. At the same time, I planned to criticize the CFTC's peculiar implementation of certain of those provisions.
As I turned right, past the bright magenta-flowered myrtle trees of the Cosmos Club garden, and walked up Florida Avenue, I reflected on the fact that I may have been one of the most long-standing advocates of swaps market reform from either political party to serve as a CFTC commissioner.12 In 2000, when I first left New York law practice and entered the swaps industry, I was struck by the fact that, unlike in most overseas trading markets, swaps brokerage was not a regulated activity. This omission hurt the professionalism of US swaps markets compared to overseas markets, in my view.
Not long after, I became a supporter of what's known as “central counterparty clearing” of swaps—that is, the practice in which a central party acts as an intermediary between buyers and sellers. In many derivatives markets, for instance, a clearinghouse serves this role, acting as the buyer to every seller and the seller to every buyer. The clearinghouse also ensures that the parties honor their contractual obligations over time.
I had seen firsthand how the emergence of central clearing in the energy swaps market increased trading liquidity and market participation. Before the financial crisis, I had led an effort at a brokerage called GFI Group to develop a central counterparty clearing facility for credit default swaps. That initiative led to the formation of IceClear Credit, which today is the world's leading clearer of those products.
I also was a supporter of greater swaps transparency. My experience from the 2008 financial crisis was that financial regulators lacked visibility into the risk that large financial institutions could fail due to inability to pay their financial obligations. Undoubtedly, swaps and other derivatives contributed to the financial crisis through the writing of credit default swaps protection by the giant insurance company American International Group, known as AIG. An equal or greater contribution came from the opacity of another complex product—not a derivative—that made its way onto bank balance sheets: collateralized mortgage obligations. While some derivatives transactions had come to be centrally recorded, what was missing was reliable information for both regulators and the marketplace about the true value and risk of these instruments. Government authorities simply did not have sufficient data to accurately assess the implications of the potential failure of a Bear Stearns, Lehman Brothers or AIG on derivatives counterparties throughout the financial system. They had little ability to assess the true danger—short of telephone calls in the middle of the crisis to specialized firms like GFI, where I was working at the time. That was just not good enough.
So, by the time Congress began drafting the bills that would become Title VII of the Dodd–Frank Act, I was already a vocal advocate for its three key pillars of swaps market reform: regulated swaps execution, central counterparty clearing, and enhanced swaps transparency through data reporting. As a Republican, my support for Dodd–Frank's swaps provisions made me a maverick in my party, which had mostly opposed the legislation. Yet, as a businessperson, I believe that intelligently regulated markets are good for the economy and job creation. My support for parts of Dodd–Frank was driven by my professional and commercial experience, not academic theory or political ideology. These particular swaps reforms were organic and not terribly radical.13 Market participants were already at work on two of them—without government urging—when the crisis hit. Completing all three reforms correctly was the right thing to do. That is why I supported swaps market reform.
Generally, in the American system, after Congress passes a law requiring new regulation by a federal agency, the agency designs and implements the rules. That gives regulators a lot of clout. No matter how good a law sounds on paper, whether it actually improves anything hinges on how the regulations implementing it are drafted. The devil is in the details.
In a remarkably short time after the passage of Dodd–Frank in 2010, the CFTC implemented most of its mandates. By the time I joined the Commission in 2014, the CFTC under its then chairman, the trenchant Gary Gensler (today chairman of the Securities and Exchange Commission),
