Policy Punchline

Dan Berkovitz is one of the five Commissioners at the U.S. Commodity Futures Trading Commission (CFTC). This interview touches on a wide range of matters in financial regulation. We first discuss the functions of the CTFC – how it regulates commodities, futures, and swaps which all play an important role in our markets despite sounding like abstract financial terms that are so distant to people’s lives. In 1974 when CFTC was first established, the commodities traded in the U.S. were mainly agricultural products, and the CFTC has since evolved dramatically in the past few decades, playing an ever more important role as hedge funds and institutional investors more frequently use commodities and futures contracts to speculate. One important duty of the CFTC is to help enforce the Dodd-Frank Act. We walk through the history of the Dodd-Frank Act – how it was a law established after the 2008 financial crisis to address some of its causes – and whether there's much validity in the criticism against the legislatio