From: Observer | Opinion
A CFTC commissioner’s plea to embrace the future of money
When I first started out in the mid-1980s as a young lawyer in New York, I walked each morning across the financial district to work at the foot of Maiden Lane near the South Street Seaport. I joined vast crowds exiting the Path Train, the Lexington Avenue Subway and the Staten Island Ferry. Some were brokers and traders heading for the trading floors of the New York and American Stock Exchanges and the NYMEX. Many others were middle and back office staff entering countless offices to record, confirm and reconcile those floor trades.
Mornings downtown are much quieter today. Those front-office floor trader jobs are mostly gone, replaced by computer algorithms and automated trading. Tomorrow, many of those middle and back office jobs may also be gone, replaced by new digital technology such as distributed ledgers, commonly referred to as the “blockchain.”
