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> Continued from Page 36These are public markets that benefit the country and [the commission] should be funded with general revenues. If that wasn’t going to occur, then I thought the lesser evil to not enough funding was a transaction fee.I had another idea for funding the agency and that was allowing it to use fines and settlements that had been obtained with regard to the Libor [London Interbank Offered Rate] settlement. Over a little more than a year, we collected $1.7 billion in fines. Yet our annual budget was just over $200 million a year.I was fairly vocal. I even pushed the Obama administration to put forward a specific transaction fee proposal.For years, for decades, Republican and Democrat presidents have called for a transaction fee to fund the CFTC, either in full or in part. But it has always been the quintessential D.C. smoke and mirrors in that they never put forward a specific proposal. So the concept, when it was presented in the annual budget, was always dead on arrival, and it was never serious. Because if any of the presidents were serious, they would send up specific legislative language, and that’s never occurred.Q: Now that you’re in the private sector, are you subject to any sort of dress code? Are you going to have to cut your hair?A: The hair stays. The hair stays. For better or worse.Q: You’re known for your pop-cultural references. So tell me what you like about popular culture. And tell me how you see popular culture impacting the financial industry, impacting Wall Street, or Wall Street impacting popular culture.A: Let me get to the first one. In general, the reason I use pop-cultural references, movies or music, is I want average audiences to understand these markets, these derivative markets, because they are so important to folks every single day.They impact everything from a gallon of milk or a gallon of gasoline to a home mortgage. People don’t know that.One of the ways I’ve tried to get them to understand not just how they work, but how policies and rules and regulations impact them is by using analogies and metaphors and references to different things that they do know.I make up limericks, poems, all sorts of things as a means to a message about what’s going on.I’m still doing television. I was on [Fox News] with Maria Bartiromo talking about HFTs [high-frequency traders].But this thing about whether or not markets impact pop culture. It definitely impacts us when you get a 2008 or aflash crash, when you talk about technology, when you get a Bernie Madoff, a Ponzi scam.Does the financial sector impact what goes on in popular culture? I was thinking about movies like “Wall Street” and “Wall Street: Money Never Sleeps.” People know the Gordon Gekko phrase “Greed is good,” so there’s a link between the financial sector and pop culture that resonates with people. Sometimes it’s sensationalized.Q: Any chance of a TV career? Sounds like you like doing it.A: I do like it. Actually people talk to me about being a regular contributor on television, so it’s something I’ve thought about. Who knows?This is something that I think I’ve done that’s different than any other regulator in history, and that is to use the media to impact policy.A lot of times the way that I got something done internally was that the mere threat that I would be talking about something got some of my colleagues to end up agreeing with me about some policies.It was one thing for them to disagree with me, but to know that I might be going on CNBC later that day had to be at the back of their mind.So they could disagree with me, but I might tell several million people about why they disagreed with me.Q: What do you think you will be doing after the 2016 elections?A: I hope to be at DLA. My resume went to a couple of places [after the CFTC], but DLA was where I really wanted to work because I think they have a forward-thinking approach about things. They’re a little bit of a disrupter in the legal space and they’re now the largest law firm in the world.Part of what I want to do is global work on harmonizing regulatory rules around the world, whether or not that’s helping out an exchange or those involved in the financial sector, but I have this great bandwidth of experience in the U.S.I know people in exchanges around the world and regulators around the world, so I wanted to go here. I plan on being here for a long time. I feel really blessed. ★37AWARDS SUPPLEMENT 2014 | FTF NEWS MAGAZINE