Wetjen announces plans to leave CFTC
August 14, 2015 |12:03 PM
Mark WetjenMark Wetjen, a member of the Commodity Futures Trading Commission, announced today he plans to resign from the commission at the end of the month.
Wetjen did not announce future plans.
A former aide to then-Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid, D-Nev., and a Democrat, he was sworn in on October 25, 2011, for a five-year term. Wetjen served as acting chairman of the commission from January 2014 to June 2014.
Wetjen’s departure will leave the commission with only three members: Chairman Timothy Massad, a Democrat, Sharon Bowen, a Democrat, and Christopher Giancarlo, a Republican.
The commission is supposed to have five members but already has one vacancy. No more than three commissioners can be of the same party.
In a letter to President Barack Obama, who appointed him, Wetjen noted that he had participated in the implementation of Title VII of the Dodd-Frank Wall Street Reform and Consumer Protection Act.
“The CFTC has successfully finished the vast majority of the work of rule writing pursuant to its mandate under Dodd-Frank — only a few rules remain to be finalized,” he said.
“More than 90 CFTC actions related to Dodd-Frank, in addition to many other commission actions, have been adopted since I joined the agency, and I supported and helped shape every one of them,” Wetjen said.
“Today there are more than 100 swap dealers provisionally registered with the CFTC, clearing mandates in place for liquid swaps and trading mandates requiring liquid swaps to be executed on regulated trading facilities, as well as new reporting obligations for market participants.
“Additionally, the agency strengthened the risk-management practices of clearinghouses and enhanced protections of customer funds held by entities registered with the CFTC. Importantly, compliance with most of these rules has been in force for months if not years,” he said.
Wetjen also has focused on international harmonization of the G20 reforms and improving the efficiency of the global derivatives markets and said he has “vigorously supported the commission’s enforcement program, which collected record fines during my tenure through the CFTC's responses to global schemes to manipulate LIBOR and foreign-currency markets, among many others.”
