Once on Sleepy Beat, Regulator Is Suddenly Busy
By JULIE CRESWELL and GRAHAM BOWLEY
NYT
Cotton, sugar, silver, wheat: in investment circles, commodities like these are hot.
Maybe too hot. At a time when prices of many commodities are soaring — cotton has jumped 95 percent in the last 12 months, silver 43 percent — alarms are going off inside the Commodity Futures Trading Commission in Washington.
Long dismissed as a lackadaisical regulator, the commission is suddenly on the move. Indeed, it is busier than ever: It opened a record 419 investigations over the last year, into things as diverse as small-time Ponzi schemes and claims of market manipulation.
It is a remarkable turnabout for the agency, which not long ago seemed on the brink of extinction. Its chairman, Gary Gensler, a former Goldman Sachs executive, has surprised some of his former Wall Street colleagues by flexing his agency’s muscles. He is rushing to expand the C.F.T.C.’s power now that the agency is poised to take on a new role in overseeing the vast market for derivatives that were traded off formal exchanges in the so-called over-the-counter market. He recently hired a former United States prosecutor as his new head of enforcement.
(More here.)
NYT
Cotton, sugar, silver, wheat: in investment circles, commodities like these are hot.
Maybe too hot. At a time when prices of many commodities are soaring — cotton has jumped 95 percent in the last 12 months, silver 43 percent — alarms are going off inside the Commodity Futures Trading Commission in Washington.
Long dismissed as a lackadaisical regulator, the commission is suddenly on the move. Indeed, it is busier than ever: It opened a record 419 investigations over the last year, into things as diverse as small-time Ponzi schemes and claims of market manipulation.
It is a remarkable turnabout for the agency, which not long ago seemed on the brink of extinction. Its chairman, Gary Gensler, a former Goldman Sachs executive, has surprised some of his former Wall Street colleagues by flexing his agency’s muscles. He is rushing to expand the C.F.T.C.’s power now that the agency is poised to take on a new role in overseeing the vast market for derivatives that were traded off formal exchanges in the so-called over-the-counter market. He recently hired a former United States prosecutor as his new head of enforcement.
(More here.)
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