Gary Gensler
Chairman, Securities and Exchange Commission
Gary Gensler was born in October 1957 in Baltimore, Maryland. He earned both a B.A. and M.B.A. from the Wharton School at the University of Pennsylvania.
He joined Goldman Sachs, where he spent 18 years. He was nominated by President Bill Clinton to be the Assistant Secretary of the Treasury for Financial Markets. He was confirmed by the Senate, serving in that position for 18 months, when President Clinton nominated him to be Under Secretary of the Treasury for Domestic Finance.
At the end of President Clinton’s administration, Gensler joined the staff of the chairman of the Senate Banking Committee as a senior advisor. He was nominated by President Barack Obama to be chairman of the Commodity Futures Trading Company, confirmed by the Senate, and served from 2009-2014. He would later serve as the chairman of the Maryland Financial Consumer Protection Commission.
Gensler has spent time as a professor of the Practice of Global Economics and Management, at MIT Sloan School of Management, and as co-director of MIT’s Fintech and Senior Advisor to the MIT Media Lab Digital Currency initiative.
He was nominated by President Joe Biden to be the Chairman of the Securities and Exchange Commission and confirmed by the Senate to a 5-year term that began April 17, 2021.
Gensler is a widower with three daughters. He is a marathon runner and avid mountain climber.
In the News…
In an interview, the chairman of the Securities and Exchange Commission, Gary Gensler, warned that, without regulation, a financial crisis caused by artificial intelligence (AI) is “nearly unavoidable” in the next decade.
“It’s frankly a hard challenge,” he said. “It’s a hard financial stability issue to address because most of our regulation is about individual institutions, individual banks, individual money market funds, individual brokers; it is just in the nature of what we do.”
The chairman said, “And this is about a horizontal [matter whereby] many institutions might be relying on the same underlying base model or underlying data aggregator,” which could produce a herd mentality.
He continued, “I do think we will in the future have a financial crisis… [and] in the after-action reports people will say, ‘Aha! There was either one data aggregator or one model… we’ve relied on.‘”
Chairman Gensler warned that a rule currently proposed is not adequate to solve the “horizontal issue.”
Contact this Leader…
Did you pray for Chairman Gensler today? You can let him know at:
The Honorable Gary Gensler, Chairman
Securities and Exchange Commission
100 F St. NE
Washington, DC 20549
