Terry Duffy has been openly and justifiably critical of Bankman-Fried and was brought on Tucker’s show to basically attack chairman of the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) Gary Gensler. For Tucker and Fox News, attacking Gensler is the same as attacking Biden. Duffy’s job is to point to the abject incompetence being shown in a regulatory commission that has been relatively impotent for the last couple of decades, by basically saying that anyone with half an education in finance knew FTX was a hot mess of potential securities fraud. Duffy did his job, and then maybe let the cat out of the bag.
It didn’t go as planned.
When asked by the ever-incredulous Carlson, “where was Gary Gensler”—former chair of the Commodity Futures Trading Commission (CTFC) and current chair of the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC)—in all of this market manipulation, Duffy tries to go into a riff about how SEC regulators seem to have tried to use a regulatory statute as an excuse for allowing bad behavior. The point here is two-fold: Duffy shows he’s an expert by quoting statute and making things sound complicated, while also saying that intelligent people like Duffy and others knew this was all hogwash, and so did the supposed regulators.
Unfortunately for Duffy, he makes quite a slip-up to begin, relaying his point as a story of meeting with “his” regulator. “I don’t know where Gary Gensler was, but my regulator at the CFTC, I bribe. I asked them, why in the world are you invoking the Commodity Exchange Act?”
Excuse me, you what?
Now, this could simply be a few things. It could be an admission that CME Group bribes the person who is tasked with making sure they follow legal regulations. If that were so, the cavalier way in which he says it implies that it is a cavalier practice. Of course, Duffy may have simply misspoken for a few reasons that don’t confer guilt on CME Group for participating in corruption. The CEO might believe that bribery was going on, and instead of saying that, slipped the word into the wrong space in his story.
Maybe he just feels like regulators are being bribed and mistakenly stuck it into his section of the story because he meant to imply it about Sam Bankman-Fried later on in the story?
Hard to say. It is pretty funny, regardless.
As the final results of the 2022 midterm elections came into focus this past week, the lack of clarity in the GOP’s leadership also became apparent. Kerry and Markos break down what this means for Democratic voters going forward and how Donald Trump’s campaign for president is a lose lose proposition for Republicans.
