Biden confirms Gensler will lead financial policy transition team

Gary Gansler, a Washington and Wall Street veteran who has carefully examined the emerging area of cryptographic currency, will lead the financial policy transition team of future U.S. President-elect Joe Biden.

 

Former chairman of the Commodity Futures Trading Commission (CFTC), Gensler has been appointed to lead a group of analysis agencies for the Federal Reserve, the banking sector and securities regulators, Biden's campaign officially announced Tuesday after last week's announcement that onon was a contender.

 

As chairman of the CFTC, Gensler served as a key financial regulator for former President Barack Obama, leading the new derivatives rules after the 2008 financial crisis. He also worked in the Ministry of Finance under the Clinton administration.

 

More recently, he has also repeatedly testified before Congress about the cryptovoltaic and siege, opposing comparisons between cryptovoltaic and Ponzi schemes and stating that the Libra token, which has not yet been launched, meets security requirements under US law. At a MIT conference two years ago, he argued that there is a "strong argument" that XRP, a cryptovite closely linked to the Ripple startup, is a security. Gensler called Blockchain technology "catalyst for change" in an article for CoinDesk in 2019.

 

Gensler did not respond to the request for comments.

 

He was one of the 500 people named on Tuesday, when Biden-Harris' group announced the names of members of the agency verification teams that will assess the functions of federal agencies and ensure a smooth transition.

 

Of course, incumbent president Donald Trump challenged the election results and filed lawsuits in several states, seeking to discount votes over alleged irregularities, albeit with little evidence to date.

 

There are also several other policy experts on the Biden Review Team's list for financial regulators who have paid close attention to cryptovoltaics, blockbusters and related issues:

• Simon Johnson, an economist and professor at Sloan School of Management at MIT, where he directed digital currency research. He was a member of the Economic Advisors Group at the Congressional Budget Office from April 2009 to April 2015. Johnson is also a co-author of an article on the broad impact of blockbuster technology on the financial world and was a member of the CoinDesk advisory board.
• Chris Brammer, a law professor and department director at Georgetown University's Institute of International Economic Law, is a well-known figure in the financial technology sector who also testified before Congress about the Libra Facebook project. Brammer was also appointed CFTC commissioner under President Obama, but after the 2016 election, that appointment was cancelled.
• Mehrsa Baradaran, a professor at the University of California School of Law at Irvine School, specializes in banking law and also testifies as an expert witness at a Senate hearing on the legal framework for the Block and Cryptovite banking committee. Baradaran has written a lot about inequality in the banking sector and criticizes the idea that projects like Facebook Libra, by default, can increase financial availability.
• Lev Menand, one of the first creators of the digital dollar concept, is a research fellow and law professor at Columbia University. From 2015 to 2016, he served as Senior Advisor to the Deputy Minister of Finance and was also an economist with the Banking Supervision Unit of the Federal Reserve Bank of New York.