CHICAGO (Reuters) - President-elect Barack Obama on Thursday named longtime financial industry regulator Mary Schapiro to head the Securities and Exchange Commission amid calls for reform of the agency in the wake of a massive investment fraud scandal.
Obama also named Georgetown University law professor Daniel Tarullo to fill one of two vacancies on the seven-seat Federal Reserve Board, which is battling to ease a credit crisis and fend off a deepening recession.
And he picked former Treasury official Gary Gensler to head the Commodities Futures Trading Commission, which regulates the U.S. commodity futures and options market.
The choice of Schapiro, a former SEC commissioner and current chief of the financial industry's self-regulatory body, came amid outrage over the SEC's failure to uncover an alleged $50 billion fraud scheme carried out over many years by legendary Wall Street investment manager Bernard Madoff.
The SEC already was under pressure to reform before the Madoff scandal broke, with lawmakers saying it should have identified problems at investment banks Bear Stearns and Lehman Brothers long before their collapse this year.
The 57-year-old Tarullo is one of Obama's leading economic advisers and served as President Bill Clinton's top adviser on international economic policy.
Gensler served as U.S. undersecretary of the Treasury from 1999 to 2001 and assistant secretary of the Treasury from 1997 to 1999. He is one of three people named by Obama's transition team to review the Securities and Exchange Commission.
