The United States Senate has appointed a new Commodity Futures Trading Commission chairman and confirmed two new commissioners to the derivatives regulator.
The new CFTC chairman is Timothy Massad, and the two new commissioners are Sharon Bowen and Christopher Giancarlo.
All three were nominated by President Barack Obama.
Massad is a senior US Treasury Department official, having held the post of assistant secretary for financial stability. He is a Harvard graduate with a 25-year career as a corporate lawyer.
He replaces Gary Gensler, who stepped down in early January when Massad was nominated as CFTC chairman.
Bowen is acting head of the Securities Investor Protection Corp (SIPC), and this led to cross-party opposition in the Senate to her appointment, with the vote carried 48-46.
Some senators want SIPC to compensate victims of Allen Stanford's Ponzi scheme, but SIPC has denied the request, saying doing so would conflict with the law that created the agency.
Giancarlo is a former chairman of the Wholesale Market Brokers’ Association Americas and executive vice president at inter-dealer broker GFI Group.
The three new appointments join commissioner Mark Wetjen, who was acting CFTC head from December last year until now, and Scott D. O’Malia on the five-person commission.
The appointments were welcomed by a leading industry body for futures, options and cleared swaps markets, FIA, whose chairman Walk Lukken welcomed the news that the CFTC finally had a full complement of commissioners.
Lukken said, “The Dodd-Frank Act greatly expanded the scope of the CFTC’s authority, and there are still many important issues that need to be addressed in the implementation of that law. So it is all the more important that the CFTC have a full complement of Commissioners at this critical moment in its history.”