Gary Gensler

Gary Gensler

Gary Gensler was Undersecretary of the Treasury (1999-2001) and Assistant Secretary of the Treasury (1997-1999) in the United States. Barack Obama has selected him to lead the Commodity Futures Trading Commission, which has jurisdiction over $5 trillion in trades.

Gary Gensler spent 18 years at Goldman Sachs, making partner when he was 30, becoming head of the company's fixed income and currency trading operation in Tokyo by the mid-'90s, and eventually the company's co-head of finance.

As the Treasury Department's undersecretary for domestic finance in the last two years of the Clinton administration, Gensler found himself in the position of overseeing policies in the areas of U.S. financial markets, debt management, financial services, and community development.

Subsequent to his time at the Treasury he acted as a Senior Advisor to Senator Paul Sarbanes, one of the authors of legislation that eventually became the Sarbanes-Oxley Act, designed to bring greater oversight to the accounting industry and reform of corporate governance.

Gensler is the co-author of a book (with Greg Baer), The Great Mutual Fund Trap. The thrust of the book is that active trading and investing is an inefficient strategy for individual investors, and that individuals should stick with index and exchange traded funds.

Coincidentally, Gensler has a twin brother Robert Gensler who runs an actively-managed fund for T. Rowe Price. Gensler also has three daughters, Anna 18, Lee 17, and Isabel 11 and currently live in Baltimore, MD. His wife, Francesca Danieli, died of breast cancer in June, 2006. Mr. Gensler serves on the board of for-profit university Strayer Education, Inc. He also was senior advisor to the Hillary Clinton campaign.