Gary Gensler, a Washington and Wall Street veteran who has studied the young cryptocurrency industry closely, will lead the Financial Policy Transition Team for alleged US President-elect Joe Biden.
Gary Gensler's views on the crypto sector leave no doubt
Former chairman of the Commodity Futures Trading Commission (CFTC), Gensler has been selected to lead the team that will oversee the Federal Reserve, banking and securities regulators.
The position was formally announced on Tuesday, following consultations last week in which Gensler was a possible candidate for the role. As chairman of the CFTC, Gensler was a key financial regulator for former President Barack Obama, spearheading new derivatives rules after the 2008 financial crisis.
He also served in the Treasury Department during the Clinton administration. More recently, he testified before Congress on cryptocurrency and blockchain on multiple occasions, rejecting the parallels between cryptocurrencies and Ponzi schemes and speaking out in favor of Libra, the native token of Facebook (Facebook shares - ticher: FB), stating that it would qualify as a security under US law. Gensler called blockchain technology a "catalyst for change" during an interview in 2019.
Other team names
In Biden's Financial Policy Transition Team financial institutions there are also many other experts who have paid special attention to cryptocurrencies, blockchain and related issues:
- Mehrsa Baradaran, a University of California professor at Irvine School of Law, specializes in banking law and also testified as an expert witness in a Senate Banking Committee hearing on regulatory frameworks for blockchain and cryptocurrency. Baradaran has written extensively on inequalities in the banking sector and is of the view that projects like Facebook's Libra could foster financial inclusion.
- Chris Brummer, a law professor and faculty director at Georgetown University's Institute of International Economic Law, is a familiar figure in the fintech industry who has also testified before the US Congress regarding Facebook's Libra project. Brummer was also appointed to serve as CFTC commissioner under President Obama, but the appointment was canceled after the 2016 election.
- Lev Menand, one of the original creators of the digital dollar concept, is an academic fellow and professor of law at Columbia University. He was a senior advisor to the Deputy Secretary of the Treasury in 2015-16 and also worked as an economist at the Federal Reserve Bank of New York's banking supervision group.
- Simon Johnson, an economist and professor at the MIT Sloan School of Management, where he led research on digital currency. He served on the Congressional Budget Office's Panel of Economic Advisers from April 2009 to April 2015. Johnson is also co-author of a paper on the broad impact blockchain technology can have on the financial world.
