GameStop, Bitcoin are hot topics at SEC confirmation hearing

The SEC has been operating under temporary leadership since the end of December, when Chairman Jay Clayton left the agency after 3.5 years in the role. Since taking office, President Biden has been looking to appoint Gary Gensler to lead Wall Street's chief regulator, prompting the latter to testify before the Senate Banking Committee on Tuesday. He was mainly grilled on tactics used by some online brokerages, given the recent GameStop (GME) trading frenzy and its fallout.Who is Gary Gensler? He's a former Goldman Sachs partner and ex-chief of the Commodity Futures Trading Commission (under President Obama). Gensler also spent time at the U.S. Treasury in the 1990's and served as the CFO for Hillary Clinton's 2016 presidential campaign. On the academia front, he's a professor at MIT's Sloan School of Management, where he teaches classes on digital currencies and blockchain.At the hearing, the SEC nominee pledged to analyze the