Controversy laden current Chair of the US Securities and Exchange Commission
Some fun facts:
GG grew up in Baltimore, MD.
He has an identical twin brother. They both attended UPenn.
GG was a coxswain on the crew team at Penn, reportedly dropping his weight to 112 lbs at one point to keep his boat light. He obtained a degree in Economics from Wharton, as well as a masters in Business Administration thereafter.
For a few years around 2018, he taught classes at MIT centered around blockchain tech. He even won an “Outstanding Teacher Award” in 2018. He is a FORMER senior advisor to the MIT Media Lab Digital Currency Initiative.
He married a female filmmaker, and the pair remained married until her sad and untimely death from breast cancer in 2006.
He has completed a 50 mile ultra marathon and has summitted both Mt. Kilimanjaro and Mt. Rainier.
Career
GG worked for Goldman Sachs for 18 years, his employment culminating as Co-Head a Finance before President Bill Clinton appointed him to the the Assistant Secretary of the Treasury.
In 2000, he campaigned strongly for the Commodities Futures Modernization Act, which actually exempted some derivatives from regulation (seemingly inconsistent with his current efforts).
In 2001, GG worked to tighten accounting requirements in the shadow of Enron
In 2009, President Obama nominated him to become the Chairman of the CFTC, where he pledged to bring regulation to derivatives (in direct opposition to his efforts in 2000, see above), which he called the “Wild West of finance.” He is now better know for calling crypto the “Wild West.”
By all accounts he is an educated and hard working man who has received numerous prizes, titles, and recognitions for his involvement in all things finance.
Finally, he must live on the planet Venus where each day has over 5000 hours to be able to render a recorded opinion on anything/everything finance, stock market, or economy related in the past 20 years.
He is not a universally beloved man in the cryptoverse. To get a general feel of how the cryptoverse views the head honcho, see below. Simply based on his time at MIT, his contentious engagement with the digital finance world has been unexpected.
“When Michael Corleone ordered hits on rival bosses in The Godfather, he had Don Cuneo locked inside a revolving door and shot. Getting whacked while trapped behind a barred door appears to be the treatment United States Securities and Exchange Commission Chair Gary Gensler has in mind for U.S. crypto projects based on recent SEC enforcement activity and comments by the chair.”
“Gensler has made a show of cracking down on crypto companies that haven’t engaged in actual misconduct. When real fraud is taking place, he’s nowhere to be seen.”
“It’s not about investor protection. It’s about keeping the public’s and the media’s eyes on the “cryptocurrency as securities” story while Gensler dupes us into forgetting that he met with Bankman-Fried in the months leading up to the FTX catastrophe — yet failed to prevent it.”
“At best, this recent round of regulatory “crackdowns” is a product of the SEC overcompensating for its past failures, which go much further back than just FTX and Terra. At worst, they’re an attempt by Gensler to distract us from the fact that he’s either corrupt or inept — and hoping we forget that he met with Bankman-Fried in 2022.”
