Archegos Capital and the Born Legacy

I recently re-watched a documentary which was produced in the immediate aftermath of the global financial crisis. Entitled “The Warning”, it tells the story of how Brooksley Born, the one-time head of the US Commodity Futures Trading Commission, was thwarted in her attempts to get US regulators and the Federal Reserve to implement meaningful oversight reforms to the over-the-counter (OTC) derivatives market.

She had been highlighting the systemic threat posed by OTC products a full decade prior to the Lehmans Bros collapse, but her warnings went unheeded by the likes of Federal Reserve Chair Alan Greenspan and Treasury Secretary Robert Rubin.