Читать книгу CryptoDad - J. Christopher Giancarlo - Страница 24

The next morning, I was in Manhattan early for a series of meetings with market participants at several trading firms and brokerages. I intended to understand firsthand how the new swaps trading and bank capital rules were impacting trading markets. My day began with an 8:30 a.m. breakfast meeting at Goldman Sachs. Other meetings at other firms would take me late into the evening.

My chief of staff, Jason Goggins, and I announced ourselves in the lobby of the state-of-the-art, yet deliberately unostentatious office tower of Goldman Sachs on West Street in the World Financial Center. The Goldman name was barely present on the ground floor where we were greeted warmly by one of the firm's understated government relations executives. He led us up to a large conference room filled with an assortment of the firm's derivatives traders, business managers, and regulatory compliance officers. They went around the table, introducing themselves. I asked the group to tell me how the new rules were working and what impact they had, if any, on the firm's ability to serve its clients. The repeated answer was that the rules were causing the firm to cut back service to its smaller customers. I ran through some ideas for proposed rule changes, which they seemed to support. I wondered whether they would continue to support changes once they mastered the complexity of the current rules and built the systems necessary to deal with them.

Following the meeting, Jason and I were escorted up to the serene executive floor with a panoramic view across the Hudson River to New Jersey. There we met Goldman's President, Gary Cohn. I knew Cohn from my time at GFI when Goldman was an important client and he was our primary point of contact. Well informed and voluble, Cohn was a straight shooter in the hard elbows arena of interdealer trading. He was also fair-minded, though never to the detriment of his firm.²¹

Cohn invited me to get comfortable on his low-lying sofa with a cup of fresh coffee. He had read the piece in the Journal. He elaborated on the theme that I had just discussed with his managers, that the impact of not only CFTC regulation, but the whole panoply of rules and regulations imposed by Dodd–Frank, the G-20 Financial Stability Board (FSB), the US Federal Reserve Board, and US Financial Stability Oversight Council (FSOC) was to cause Goldman and its competitors to reserve cash rather than putting it to work on behalf of clients. As a result, Goldman would offer its limited resources more selectively to its best and largest clients. It was another incidence of ill-crafted regulation helping big companies over small ones.

I left Cohn's executive suite and headed to meetings with other New York swaps trading firms. I had no way of knowing that in just a few years Gary Cohn would play a key role in my career trajectory.

Meanwhile, I received word from a number of attendees at SEFCON that my speech and the announcement of the white paper were causing quite a stir. Undoubtedly, the White House's waiver denial ensured that the speech that was not given at SEFCON received far more attention than it would have garnered if it had been given from the SEFCON podium.

Thank you, CFTC Office of General Counsel and, maybe, the White House. As a junior commissioner, I could not possibly have received that much attention without your help.