“The State of Food Insecurity in the World 2014: Strengthening the Enabling Environment for Food Security and Nutrition,” 2014, available at http://www.fao.org/publications/card/en/c/56efd1a2-0f6e-4185-8005-62170e9b27bb/9 9. United States Census Bureau, International Data Base World Population: 1950–2050, available at http://www.census.gov/population/international/data/idb/worldpopgraph.php
10 10. David Pilling, “The Real Price of Madagascar's Vanilla Boom,” The Financial Times (June 5, 2018), illustrating how the absence of a functioning market for vanilla futures was producing a cycle of boom and bust in Madagascar's vanilla crop, exacerbating poverty and violent gang activity on the African island. Available at https://www.ft.com/content/02042190-65bc-11e8-90c2-9563a0613e56
11 11. The Cosmos Club, founded in 1878, is a Washington social club distinguished in science, literature and the arts, a learned profession, or public service. Members come from virtually every profession that has anything to do with scholarship, creative genius, or intellectual distinction. Among its members have been three presidents, two vice presidents, a dozen Supreme Court justices, 36 Nobel Prize winners, 61 Pulitzer Prize winners and 55 recipients of the Presidential Medal of Freedom.
12 12. The most notable and perhaps most important CFTC commissioner to advocate for reform of swaps markets was former Chair Brooksley Born (in office: August 26, 1996–June 1, 1999), who called on Congress and the Clinton administration to authorize the CFTC to regulate over-the-counter swaps and who resigned as chair as a matter of principle when those calls were rejected.
13 13. Reporting, clearing, exchange trading, price discovery, and transparency have been the hallmarks of the (well-regulated) futures industry for over 100 years.
14 14. It is estimated that following the 2008 Financial Crisis, minimum global clearing rates were about 40% for interest rate swaps and 8% for credit default swaps. By 2017, about 85% both of new interest rate swaps and new credit default swaps were being cleared. See generally, CFTC Chairman J. Christopher Giancarlo, “Cross Border Swaps Regulation Version 2.0: A Risk-Based Approach with Deference to Comparable Non-US Regulation” at https://www.cftc.gov/sites/default/files/2018-04/oce:chairman_swapregversion2whitepaper_042618.pdf
15 15. Giancarlo, Cross Border Swaps Regulation Version 2.0.
16 16. See Commissioner J. Christopher Giancarlo, “Pro-Reform Reconsideration of the CFTC Swaps Trading Rules: Return to Dodd–Frank” (Jan. 29, 2015), available at https://www.cftc.gov/sites/default/files/idc/groups/public/@newsroom/documents/file/sefwhitepaper012915.pdf (Hereinafter, “Giancarlo, Pro-Reform Reconsideration.”)
17 17. Giancarlo, “Pro-Reform Reconsideration”
18 18. Giancarlo, “Pro-Reform Reconsideration”
19 19. J. Christopher Giancarlo, “Flawed US Rules Fragment Swaps Market: Avoiding US Rules Is Now the Driving Force in Global Swaps Market,” Comment, Financial Times (November 10, 2014), available at https://www.ft.com/content/e70bbdfc-666f-11e4-8bf6-00144feabdc0
20 20. Katy Burne, “CFTC's Giancarlo: New Rules Divide Swaps Market: Rules Threaten Wall Street Jobs and Could Destablize Financial Markets, He Says,” Wall Street Journal, (November 11, 2014) at https://www.wsj.com/articles/cftcs-giancarlo-says-new-rules-are-dividing-swaps-market-1415744134
21 21. For insight into Gary Cohn's remarkable personal story, see generally: Malcolm Gladwell, David and Goliath: Underdogs, Misfits, and the Art of Battling Giants (Little Brown, 2013).
Chapter 2 Starting Grid
I think this is the greatest and best country in all the world, with its great sunlit spaces and its long long roads, and best of all the roads that are not made yet, and the stories that no one has told because they are too busy living them.
—Nellie McClung (author and social activist), In Times Like These
Moving on Up
So exactly how did I find myself in November 2014 tangling with the White House for permission to speak at a New York business conference? Well, it came about because five months before in June 2014 I had become the newest of five commissioners of the US Commodity Futures Trading Commission. The faraway journey that brought me there is a unique story in its own right.
There is a road in New Jersey that embodies the American experience and my own. Bloomfield Avenue stretches northwesterly away from Newark's gritty asphalt to the lush Watchung Mountains. Laid out in the early 1800s, Bloomfield Avenue was New Jersey's first county road. It arcs across Essex County, linking a series of towns metamorphosing from urban streets peopled by newly arrived immigrants to manicured lawns gracing mansions housing descendants of the Pilgrims.
Bloomfield Avenue also arcs across my family's history. In the first decade of the twentieth century, my father's maternal grandparents, Loretto Onorio Greco and his wife, Maria Louisa, left the Valle di Comino in the central Italian region of Lazio. They traveled first to Paris and then across the Atlantic and much of the North American continent to the coal mines of Pictou, west of Walsenberg, Colorado. There they gave birth in 1909 to my grandmother, Fiorina, the second child of nine. Eventually the Greco family made its way to Newark's First Ward—then one of the largest Italian immigrant communities in the United States. There Onorio became prosperous as a property developer before returning to Italy.
While in Newark, the teenage Fiorina met my grandfather, Celestino Fortunato Giancarlo, known as Charlie. He was born in 1903 in Lucca in the Tuscany region of Italy. His parents were itinerant laborers who would journey north each spring to work in northern European cities, mostly as masons and gardeners. Charlie's mother died when he was 12, forcing him to leave school for work. As a result, he never formally learned to read or write. His father remarried an Italian woman living in Paris named D'Agostino and started a new family. In 1921, at age 18, my grandfather and his older brother caught a ship out of Cherbourg for America, where they set to work as laborers in Newark. He never saw his father again.
