Fireside Chat: “Financial Regulation and Beyond: An Insider's Perspective” with Sharon Bowen & Guy Rolnik

Join the Stigler Center for a conversation with Sharon Bowen, former commissioner of the Commodity Futures Trading Commission (CFTC) and Booth professor Guy Rolnik, on the challenges and opportunities facing regulators in the financial sector and beyond.

In June 2017, when Ms. Bowen announced her intent to resign from the CFTC, there were only two commissioners on what is mandated to be a five-member bipartisan board. Lacking a full complement of commissioners since 2014, the CFTC had been “frozen in place while the markets we regulate are moving faster every day,” Bowen explained upon her announcement. “This fact,” she added, “is intolerable to me.”

Ms. Bowen will offer an insider’s perspective on the progress made to reduce systemic financial risk, the remaining challenges in areas such as cybersecurity and high frequency trading, avoiding regulatory capture, maintaining competitive markets, the future of the Dodd-Frank Act, and the possible implications for regulators, the financial industry, and beyond.

Sharon Bowen brings more than 35 years of regulatory, securities, and public policy expertise. She joined the Intercontinental Exchange, Inc. Board of Directors in December 2017, and also serves on the boards of certain NYSE U.S. regulated exchanges. Most recently, she served as a Commissioner of the U.S. Commodity Futures Trading Commission (CFTC) from 2014 - 2017. During that time, she was a sponsor of the CFTC Market Risk Advisory Committee. Bowen was previously confirmed by the U.S. Senate and appointed by President Obama on February 12, 2010 to serve as Vice Chair of the Securities Investor Protection Corporation (SIPC). She assumed the role of Acting Chair in March 2012. Prior to her appointment to the CFTC, she was a partner in the New York office of Latham & Watkins LLP. Bowen’s broad and diverse corporate and transactional practice of almost 32 years began in 1982 when she started her career as an associate at Davis Polk & Wardwell. She joined Latham as a senior corporate associate in the summer of 1988 and became a partner January 1991, and continued at Latham & Watkins LLP until 2014. Bowen earned a BA in Economics from the University of Virginia, MBA from the Kellogg School of Management and JD from Northwestern University School of Law.

Guy Rolnik is a clinical associate professor of strategic management at Booth. For the last 28 years, he has lived and worked in the intersection of business, finance, regulation, politics, and the media. First, as a financial journalist and editor, later as a business entrepreneur and founder of a media company, and in the last decade as a policy entrepreneur—using media as a tool for driving structural reforms in the economy. Rolnik earned a BA in Economics from Tel Aviv University, a Kellogg-Recanati International MBA from the EMBA program at Northwestern University and Tel Aviv University, and an AMP165 from the advanced management program at Harvard Business School.

All seminars take place from 12-1 pm in Harper Center, Room 104 (5807 S Woodlawn Ave)

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