Gary Gensler Strikes Out
Investing. Commodities. Federal preemption. Three conceptual failures from one of America’s most decorated financial regulators
Gary Gensler boasts a noteworthy resume. Wharton grad. Goldman Sachs partner. Assistant Secretary of Financial Markets at the U.S. Treasury. Under Secretary of Domestic Finance. Recipient of Treasury’s Alexander Hamilton Award. Senior Advisor on the Sarbanes-Oxley Act. Chair of the Commodity Futures Trading Commission. Teaching at Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Chair of the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission. Teaching back at MIT.
Whether you agree with him or not, he spent decades at the center of modern finance, regulation and market structure–and few people have shaped the crypto regulatory conversation more than he did. And now, he is commenting on prediction markets:
You don’t have to agree with Gensler on everything just because he has institutional pedigree. But the baseline expectation is that his positions are at least defensible. Plausible. Internally consistent. Those aren’t exactly high bars to clear. They are the minimum expectation for someone who has moved through the upper echelons of finance, academia, and government; including some of the most powerful regulatory positions in the country.
Is it really that difficult to expect that someone who chaired the SEC–an agency tasked with protecting investors–would have a coherent point of view on what investing actually means?
Is it unreasonable to believe that someone who chaired both the SEC and the CFTC would understand how securities and commodities interact with one another?
Is it too much to ask that a former Chair of the CFTC be able to articulate an internally consistent position on federal preemption?
It’s not.
Gensler may very well have good intentions. When he went after crypto, I always had the sense that he genuinely believed the public needed more protection–and in many respects, that instinct was correct.
So I do not think this is about bad faith or some hidden agenda. The deeper issue is that behind all of these accomplishments and credentials sits a surprisingly inconsistent intellectual framework.
