text: Enforcement Chief to Step Down at Financial Derivatives Regulator - The New York Times
  DealBook|Enforcement Chief to Step Down at Financial Derivatives Regulator
  Aitan Goelman will step down in February as chief of the Commodity Futures Trading Commission's enforcement division.
  One of the Obama administration's few remaining Wall Street enforcers is stepping down.
  Aitan Goelman, head of the Commodity Futures Trading Commission's enforcement division, announced his departure on Wednesday during a broad exodus of prosecutors and regulators in the Obama administration's final days.
  The departures, all expected, included Leslie Caldwell, the head of the Justice Department's criminal division in Washington, Bill Baer, a senior Justice Department official who imposed huge fines on big banks, and Andrew J. Ceresney, who led the enforcement division of the Securities and Exchange Commission. Preet Bharara, the United States attorney in Manhattan, who has brought many cases involving Wall Street crimes, will be one of the few Obama appointees to remain in his post under the next administration.
  Mr. Goelman's exit, which takes effect Feb. 3, comes after he announced some of the commission's biggest enforcement cases.
  In 2015, Mr. Goelman imposed the agency's largest-ever penalty: an $800 million settlement with Deutsche Bank for manipulation of the London interbank offered rate, the global benchmark known as Libor. Late last year, Mr. Goelman took aim at Goldman Sachs for trying to manipulate another global benchmark, for fixed interest rate swaps, known as the Isdafix. And just this month, the agency struck a $5 million settlement with Jon S. Corzine, the former Democratic governor of New Jersey who ran the brokerage firm MF Global when it collapsed in 2011.
  "Lack of resolve and panic is contagious, and so is confidence and toughness," Mr. Goelman, a former white collar defense lawyer who is expected to return to private practice, said in an interview. "I'd like to think the enforcement division, by osmosis, has acted like a regulator that is confident and sure of itself," he said, crediting "the lawyers in the trenches."
  But Mr. Goelman's legacy — and that of his predecessor, David Meister — now falls partly into the hands of the next administration.
  President-elect Donald J. Trump has not appointed a chairman of the commission, the nation's top regulator of derivatives contracts. But the current chairman, Timothy G. Massad, a Democrat, will step down from that role when Mr. Trump becomes president on Friday. J. Christopher Giancarlo, a Republican commissioner, will most likely become its interim leader and is reportedly under consideration to be nominated to become chairman.
  Although Mr. Trump has promised a far more business friendly administration than Mr. Obama, Mr. Goelman said he expected the new administration to continue pressing cases of Wall Street wrongdoing. Still, he warned that the commission might not be able to do so if Congress deprives it of funding, a longtime source of tension between the agency and lawmakers.
  "There's a lot of misconduct out there, some of which we need more money to catch," Mr. Goelman said.
  The need for resources took on greater importance as Mr. Goelman pushed for more cases to go to trial. As part of a new settlement policy, he generally offered defense lawyers the most generous proposal first. This approach, he said, provided a more credible threat of going to trial, which the agency did indeed do last year when it tried three cases, compared with only two trials in the last five or so years combined.
  As a former federal prosecutor who helped convict the Oklahoma City bombing suspects, Mr. Goelman also emphasized referring certain cases for criminal prosecution. A number of Libor traders faced criminal charges as an outgrowth of the commission's investigations, for example, as did the so-called flash-crash trader, Navinder Singh Sarao, who was accused of contributing to that May 2010 market plunge.
  "Thanks to Aitan's leadership, the partnership between the C.F.T.C. and the criminal division is stronger than ever," Ms. Caldwell said. "Together we have worked on some truly cutting edge cases involving brazen manipulation of the financial markets."