Gary Gensler spent much of the past month fending off Wall Street’s campaign to slow the move to electronic swaps trading, and when the platforms went live last week, the top U.S. derivatives regulator wasn’t going to let a government shutdown stop him from monitoring its progress, Bloomberg News reported today. With most of the staff at the Commodity Futures Trading Commission’s Washington, D.C., headquarters on furlough, Gensler, in his final months on the job, had to pick up the phone and call around to make sure the system was working. “It was a very good start,” he said. “Though the CFTC is in darkness with the shutdown, we’ve been able to bring some additional light to the marketplace.” It was a quiet start for one of the Dodd-Frank Act’s main solutions for making derivatives transactions less opaque. While that didn’t immediately fulfill Gensler’s goal of bringing $633 trillion in derivatives trading out in the open, the low volume gives the market time to adjust with fewer disruptions, traders said.
