Obama names next heads of SEC and CFTC

US president-elect Barack Obama has named the next leaders of the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) and Commodity Futures Trading Commission (CFTC) following his call for "a 21st century regulatory framework to ensure a crisis like this can never happen again".

Mary Schapiro will chair the SEC, while Gary Gensler will chair the CFTC. Schapiro is currently chief executive of the Financial Industry Regulatory Authority, the US's largest independent regulator of securities firms. She has many years of experience in financial regulation, having previously also served as a SEC commissioner and as chairman of the CFTC.

Gensler served as undersecretary of the Treasury during the Clinton administration and later as a senior adviser to the Senate banking committee. He has also spent a decade as a partner at Goldman Sachs.

Obama also appointed one of his economic advisers, Dan Tarullo, as a governor of the Federal Reserve Board. Tarullo previously served as an economic adviser during the Clinton administration.

"These individuals will help put in place new commonsense rules of the road that will protect investors, consumers and our entire economy from fraud and manipulation by an irresponsible few," said Obama in a press conference in Chicago on December 18.

"These rules will reward the industriousness and entrepreneurial spirit that's always been the engine of our prosperity, and crack down on the culture of greed and scheming that has led us to this day of reckoning."

These appointments follow Obama's announcement in late November that Timothy Geithner, president of the Federal Reserve Bank of New York, will take up the role of the next US Treasury secretary, replacing Hank Paulson. Obama enters office on January 20, 2009.

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