With Gary Gensler’s term expired in April, 2013 and a re-appointment being as soon as July, Elizabeth Warren is decrying commissioners for what she sees as stalling regulation.
Certain policies that the Commodity Futures Trading Commission has been working on include a deal with cross-border swaps. One of the policies would require any domestic bank with a foreign branch carrying out more than eight billion dollars of swaps with a domestic entity, to register with the CFTC. This has prompted some concern from abroad about the US intruding in foreign jurisdictions with regulatory policies that conflict domestically. Banks in the United States, in the meantime, postulate that this could hurt American businesses.
Democratic Senator Elizabeth Warren says that she will be watching the CFTC if they try to further slow down policy making. If they stall beyond the current deadline of finalizing regulation, which is July 12th, 2013, then there is a chance that Gary Gensler will no longer be chairman of the CFTC. As she said in an interview on June 20th with The Hill, “It would be a real mistake for commissioners to think they can run out the clock and just hold tight until Gary Gensler’s term expires. I will certainly still be here and watching this process very closely”
In addition to the commissioners Warren is addressing, there are other branches of the US government interested in slowing down the CFTC’s policy decisions, perhaps to put it out of Gensler’s reach. The House Financial Services committee recently passed a bipartisan bill in support of exempting foreign banks from these regulations as long as they deem their regulatory bodies to be of equal purport.