What do financial markets and motherhood have in common? More than you might think.
In this episode, Jamila Piracci, principal of Roos Innovations, joins host Dee Martin to explore the delicate act of translating financial markets to increase understanding between the public and private sectors. Jamila reflects on the ways motherhood, music, and entrepreneurship have shaped her leadership and decision-making over the years, guiding her journey from public service to building her own firm.
Watch the Conversation on YouTube:
Transcript:
Dee Martin
Hello, everyone. I’m your host of Madam Policy, Dee Martin. I’m a partner in the policy resolution group at Bracewell. Today, we’re thrilled to have with us Jamila Piracci, principal of Roos Innovations, which is in Houston, Texas — also happens to be the home of Bracewell, although I’m here in Washington, DC. Jamila has been the director of the Futures Industry Association, former vice president of over-the-counter derivatives for the Natural Futures Association, former counsel at the Federal Reserve Bank of New York, and former assistant general counsel at ISDA. She is a financial expert, and we look forward to hearing from her today. Before I formally welcome you, Jamila, I just want to note for everybody: Jamila is speaking next week. She has a virtual conference for the Futures Industry Association, and she’s teaching a foundational course designed to introduce people to the world of swaps, including both over-the-counter and listed derivatives. You can check her out or register at FIA.org. Jamila, welcome. We’re thrilled to have you here.
Jamila Piracci
Thank you so much, Dee. It’s great to be here and to speak with you.
Dee Martin
We’re going to have fun today. We’re both wearing green, which is exciting — we didn’t plan this, though I think going forward I’m going to ask all of our guests to dress alike. Let me start with your career. Much of it has been spent in the architecture of financial markets, and that’s not an easy place to practice. What you’re focused on are the systems and safeguards that most of us never see, but they underpin everything from energy markets to retirement savings — they play a huge role in all of our lives. You’ve worked in a multitude of places on these issues, both in the private sector and in public service. For those who may not live and breathe market structure, can you describe the work that you do and why it matters to our everyday lives beyond Wall Street?
Jamila Piracci
Sure, of course. It’s funny — when I first started my career, I thought, am I ever going to do anything that helps people? I don’t do anything that’s useful to my family. My family says, oh, you’re a lawyer, can you help me with this real estate thing, can you help me with this trust and estates thing? And I have to say, actually, I don’t do any of that. I had a lot of inferiority early in my career about the fact that my work was useless, I felt.
Dee Martin
I know — we have a saying in our house: if there were a zombie apocalypse, I would be utterly useless. I can’t do wills or estates, and I can’t do any of what my family thinks lawyers do. So I hear you, I feel you. But we’re home here in Washington, DC, so it’s fine.
Jamila Piracci
It’s true — that is true. I finally discovered that in fact, I am helping everyday people, and our financial services are extremely critical. The cars that we buy, the homes that we mortgage, the educations that we finance — our entire cost of living is underpinned by the financial system that our work helps support. I’m not saying we’re doing something with more of a white hat than a fireman, but we play a part just as much as those participating in other sectors. What I specifically do is help market participants find their way in regulated landscapes involving derivatives and banking. I also help policymakers and regulators understand markets so they can continue to meet their goal of serving people in the economy. Sometimes I do this through assistance with licensing strategies for firms seeking to register with an agency. Other times, I write, I speak, and I offer information and education. Most of all, I’m a translator — that’s what I do, work between industry and public sector representatives to help them understand each other. And I do think it matters, what we do.
Dee Martin
Yeah, absolutely. It’s funny — I was about to say I think of you as a translator. But what makes you uniquely qualified to be such a good translator is that you’ve served on both sides. You’ve done it for the private sector as a representative of the private sector, but you’ve also done it on the public service side. So you know what the regulators are trying to accomplish, and you know what the stakeholder community needs to meet those objectives while still succeeding in underpinning our entire economy. It’s a unique position to be in, and I’m glad that you’re there. So, before we get into your personal journey, I have to mention that not only are we both wearing green, but we both just celebrated a major life milestone. Folks, for those of you who don’t know, Jamila and I each have a child who graduated from high school this year. Jamila, as you look at this new season of parenting, how has motherhood influenced the way that you lead, make decisions, and define success?
Jamila Piracci
It has really changed a lot — or maybe being a mother has helped me understand the waves of change in my work, or the waves of change in my work have helped me understand being a mother. Either way, they’ve had a parallel track; it’s evolved. It’s made me a person who has to evolve, because both of those fronts require it. There have been stages where things are very black and white, like transactions — the money has to get here by this time, there’s this much money, and it can’t be wrong. And just like when the kids were little, they needed to know simple truths: this is good, this is bad, this is wonderful, thank you for doing that, don’t touch the hot stove. But then there are stages when things get gray — very gray. As the kids have gotten older, it gets grayer, and I’m more advising, helping them find the best path among many good scenarios, helping them untangle the shades of difficulty and incorrect behavior, and helping them understand the tension that weighs down our ability to make good decisions as we look at the world. So, similar to now — the kids are older, they seek my counsel, but they also have to be empowered to make their own good choices. My work with clients and with the public sector is very similar.
Dee Martin
Let me ask a quick follow-up — I totally agree with what you’re saying. What does success look like through your lens for your children? Maybe a better question is, how do you help them define what success is? I think there are a lot of expectations placed on children these days, so we’re thinking about what success looks like.
Jamila Piracci
Success is difficult, it’s hard fought. I’ve been very transparent with them that when, for example, I’ve stepped away from the full press of my career at various times — including as the kids approached high school — I wasn’t sure I was successful anymore, and they’ve been present for those conversations. But they’ve also seen me joyful, reaching milestones, at certain mountaintops where I’m saying, I have done something uniquely within my talent, where I provided value that probably nobody else could provide, because it was me. So what we’ve tried to instill in the children is that success looks like doing what you’re uniquely suited to do to the very best of your ability, leaving nothing behind, leaving everything on the field when you tackle something. And sometimes success also looks like doing something you’re not that talented at, but that needs to be filled as a gap, and you just push through it. I think that’s hopefully what I’ve started to leave with them, and what they’re starting to practice.
Dee Martin
I think you’re clearly leading and teaching by example, because if you look at your career, it hasn’t been linear — you’ve done so many different and interesting things. It’s been an extraordinary career, but also one that’s taken a lot of gumption. You helped build entirely new regulatory frameworks, you relocated your family, and you ultimately launched Roos Innovations. That is leading by example, taking chances and risks. Was there a moment when you realized, I’m going to bet on myself here, I’m going to build something of my own? And if so, what gave you the confidence to do that?
Jamila Piracci
There were three moments when I bet on myself. The first was personal — learning how to think in advance about what I wanted out of my social life, from a dating and relationship perspective. That allowed me to stop being reactive to social situations, as I had been in my early and mid-twenties, and instead proactively think about my values and what I wanted in my life and with whom I was going to associate. That ultimately led to meeting my now-husband. Carrying that forward, I started to apply it to my work. When my family and I moved to Texas, I didn’t have any professional relationships — we moved here for the kids, for educational opportunities, and I had no professional relationships in Houston. So I had to start from scratch. My mother said, why don’t you hire yourself? I thought, fine — but I only want to run a music business, I don’t want to run a derivatives advisory firm at all. But this goes back to the point of—
Dee Martin
And you know her, and you know she’d be a tough boss. So that’s hard.
Jamila Piracci
Yeah, I do. Instinctively, I knew I might not want to work for her. But—
Dee Martin
Yeah, exactly, I get that.
Jamila Piracci
But my mother knows her well too, so I trusted that advice. It goes back to that point about success — sometimes it’s not the obvious thing you know how to do that seems easy, it’s the thing that needs to be done. I did it, and I ended up loving it. So the third time I bet on myself was after a stint having started my own practice — I was recruited by a prestigious firm to work for them, and I loved that experience. Through it, I learned about things that were squarely in my wheelhouse, involving translation work between the private and public sector. I decided that since I’d been successful helping them build and expand their business, I could take that talent and invest it in myself, doing the same thing in areas where I thought I had unique talent. So that was the third time, and I did that at the end of 2023.
Dee Martin
It’s interesting, because all three of those moments go back to what you’re teaching your children, and what you’ve taught them since the beginning. It’s an important lesson to teach — not only by being present, but by leading by example. I’m going to indulge us both in a little nostalgia here: like you, I worked on Dodd-Frank legislation, and then you worked on implementation, way back in the day. Folks, that was the financial overhaul that occurred in Congress and the regulatory agencies immediately following the financial crisis in 2008. I actually came back early from maternity leave to work on that, on the legislative side. My world was the NRSRO world — the nationally recognized statistical rating organizations, as they were called at the time. You had a very different side — you were helping build the National Futures Association swap dealer program from the ground up, and we alluded to this a little earlier. People always think that once a bill gets passed, it’s all done — Congress has done its part, and now it’s just the law. That’s true, but the regulatory agencies have to implement it, and that’s really where a lot of the hard work begins, and you were on the ground floor of that. What was it like for you to build something that didn’t exist before, that was so complicated and affected a multitude of stakeholders?
Jamila Piracci
First, I’m glad you were working on the rating agency legislation — being a structured derivatives lawyer dealing with the complications of that process was very difficult, and it was very hard in the financial crisis to figure out how to resolve it. So we’re all grateful for the work you did to bring some clarity. With regard to my work on the post-Dodd-Frank implementation, I loved working with the CFTC on interpretive issues, because that becomes the next hard thing — lawmakers have written down statutory requirements and handed the agencies what they need to do in terms of rulemaking. The CFTC began its rulemaking efforts at a very fast pace, and I loved being part of the dialogue as that rulemaking unfolded — helping the regulated community, the new swap dealers, understand what the CFTC intended by these rules, and at the same time helping the CFTC translate that back into how those rules would be reviewed as implemented in the firms, with the backdrop of what they’d intended when writing the rules. That was a great translation exercise back then. I also loved working with lawmakers who were still working on security-based swap dealer issues — that was my favorite part of the job. And I also served as therapist for the industry — they were regularly on the ledge and stressed out, and I loved helping them see how being at that stage gave them a front-row seat to cultivate their perspective on the future as best they could. It was, of course, also extremely daunting.
Dee Martin
I want to come back to that, but that was a very stressful time — the US economy was in a period of major transition, there were a lot of vulnerabilities, and the financial services industry was working hard to make changes and implement them. I’m glad you were there for that. I’ll ask you this: what’s one thing you wish legislators knew when working on legislation like that — about the gap between legislative language and regulatory implementation?
Jamila Piracci
I wish they looked at the next crisis rather than the last one. When I was at the Fed — the first time, and the second time, because I was there twice — the deputy general counsel at that time asked a question I don’t hear lawmakers asking: what should we worry about that hasn’t happened yet? What’s coming next that we need to be aware of? Lawmakers need to ask that because that’s what the public needs solved for and hopes lawmakers are thinking about — and it’s what the market is doing naturally. Markets are constantly absorbing not just the past but anticipating what’s coming. As we have new markets coming online, they’re literally designed to take into account the possibilities of the future, and I don’t think lawmakers do that enough — they’re reactive to the past.
Dee Martin
That brings me to another question. I think, again, you’re uniquely qualified for the role you play on the CFTC’s Energy and Environmental Markets Advisory Committee, because you can do that forward-looking work there that you’re hoping legislators are also doing — but with a regulatory agency. We’re entering a moment of extraordinary demand and growth in the energy space, from AI and data centers to reshoring and electrification. At the same time, markets are navigating evolving regulation and some geopolitical uncertainty. Do you think our energy and environmental markets are equipped for what’s coming? What concerns you most, and what do you see as reasons for optimism?
Jamila Piracci
I think the markets are always equipped — I believe free markets are inherently equipped for what’s coming. What we struggle with is that we become aware of our lack of control and try to intervene through additional rules or by constraining markets, and that tends to keep the market from driving toward what it’s already resolving. Markets are punished when they don’t solve problems or meet needs on their own, and they’re rewarded very handsomely when they do. So they have a knack for picking up what all kinds of stakeholders need, and they all drive toward returns at the end of the day. I think they’re extremely well equipped. My concern is government intervention — when governments don’t allow markets to develop naturally, they go beyond making sure there’s basic integrity and attempt to decide winners and losers. That’s something we addressed on the EMAC with the CFTC — when governments pick winners and losers, they tend to do a poor job of something free markets do quite well on their own. Optimistically, we did manage to escape some of the dangers of replacing what free markets can do to create opportunity and happy living for many people, because governments were driving toward particular goals. Once we realized that false goal-setting without real practical awareness wasn’t going to work, the market started producing those goals on its own, because markets are incredibly good at doing that.
Dee Martin
You are a good translator — that was a very helpful explanation.
Jamila Piracci
Yeah.
Dee Martin
I’m going to pivot now. You mentioned earlier that if you were going to be an entrepreneur and run a business, it would be related to music. I came across an interview you gave during the pandemic, where you described the beautiful chaos happening in your home — your children were learning remotely, everybody running in and out trying to get their jobs done in different areas of the house, as many of us were. But the one thing you and your family really protected was music. You talked about checking in on your children’s music lessons and working on music together in the evenings. I need to know what that means — working on your music. Are you a family of musicians? A traveling band? Tell me exactly what you’re talking about.
Jamila Piracci
No, we are not the Partridge Family or something.
Dee Martin
I love it, I love the notion of it.
Jamila Piracci
Right, so cute. But no — I sing opera. At the time, my daughter played the cello, and my son played and still plays the piano. My husband doesn’t play an instrument and is much more likely to listen to a podcast when relaxing than music. My daughter is more of a visual artist than a musician, but we always had the children involved in some kind of art — it just happened that at the time, my daughter had picked up the cello. So because they were both taking music lessons, we had practice time in the evening after school. It was important to preserve this because the arts were, first of all, core to their education. It happened, as I said, to be music — I believe music and the arts in general are core to communication between people, and even when words are lost, it connects anyhow. At that time, I was also developing a project called the Lullaby Project, about the relationship between parent and child as expressed through the form of the lullaby, and the kids helped me by doing a piano-cello duet as part of that project. So that’s kind of what it meant for us to do music together at that time, and it’s evolved as the kids have taken on their own version of what it means to spend time with art — or in my son’s case, music — to express themselves without constraint. Now they do so without formal lessons, but on their own, in their spare time.
Dee Martin
How did you get into opera?
Jamila Piracci
My parents. When I was young, my parents had the same philosophy — that one should have sport and art in one’s life in addition to academics. So I was taking flute through a program in Austin, where I grew up. I went to a recital and saw someone singing, and my mother saw the spark in my eye. My parents were my biggest supporters of my operatic endeavors since I was in middle school.
Dee Martin
Do you still perform?
Jamila Piracci
I do, from time to time. I’m finishing up the Lullaby Project this summer, and this fall I hope to do a performance in New York. It’s core to—
Dee Martin
Tell us.
Jamila Piracci
It is core. If I’m off at all, you’ll know it’s because I haven’t been singing — it’s very central for me. It helps me find clarity, and it’s also part of what I’ve developed in my practice. Music and the arts are, in my mind, akin to the way free markets and physics operate — they’re immutable, and they’re core to human flourishing. When we intervene and interrupt free markets, we cause damage to the opportunity for humans to flourish. I think that’s why I did the Lullaby Project — it was a reaction to a time when I wasn’t in balance with recognizing my own free market, if you will — my own natural talent, my own voice in the world, which was music, and my own connection with my children, which was my voice. So I created this project to be a permanent record of my spirit’s connection to my children, and I thought it represented something about any parent’s connection to their children. I began to think about how the lullaby has always represented that for people — that’s the time they say goodnight, a time when they’re thinking very sweetly about their children but also going to miss them. And isn’t that also how people need to interact — there’s a sweetness about meeting and a bittersweetness about departing. If we can keep the thread long enough and allow it to exist, might we behave better? That’s part of what I explore in my work, and why I focus so much on the relationship between the private and public sector — because it really is about the relationship, and allowing the natural pattern of things to exist long enough to reach its full potential.
Dee Martin
Jamila, that is just beautiful. Although you can’t do that to me right now, because my daughter just graduated and she’s leaving — now I’m going to cry.
Jamila Piracci
You’re not — that’s what the lullabies are about.
Dee Martin
Point. I know, I know. Look at me.
Jamila Piracci
That’s the point, that is the point. This is part of the challenge, and this is why we over-intervene in markets. Our natural tendency is to say, if I can’t control it, if I don’t let it be — I’m going to step in and tell it what to do. No — let it happen, let it be, let it become what it needs to be. If you do, just like our relationships, you’ll find something beautiful, like when your child wakes up in the morning. If you don’t let the child sleep, they’re going to be a mess in the morning, as we know.
Dee Martin
I think that’s beautiful. The fact that you’ve woven together this beautiful symbiotic relationship with children and the beautiful symbiosis between markets and the private sector, and married them together — it’s perfect, I love it. I hope you write it. Are you going to write a book one day?
Jamila Piracci
I hope to. When I get… Okay. Good.
Dee Martin
Aside from all of your other projects and your work and everything else — well, I have one other question for you, but I’m also going to tell you right now: you tell us when you’re performing, I would love to see you perform. I think that’s amazing, and I support the arts and having that creative outlet too. If you could sit down with your twenty-four-year-old self, the young woman just beginning her career, what advice would you give her?
Jamila Piracci
I would tell her to follow her heart in her work and live fully. Don’t be held back doing something less than that because you think you have to protect someone or take care of other things first. Put it all out there and be who you are.
Dee Martin
Would twenty-four-year-old Jamila have listened to you?
Jamila Piracci
I think she would have — which is why sixty-four, seventy-four-year-old Jamila tries to think about what I’d tell myself now. I would tell myself not to worry about the times I haven’t lived fully, because just like everything we’ve described, it doesn’t have to be completely in our control — we can allow it to evolve. The ideas I have today are not the last ideas I’ll have. The dreams I have today are not the last dreams I’ll have. It’s completely fine to let the continuous creative process of life happen, and I can pick from any of those, any of my remaining days. So there’s no need to worry about the thing I didn’t allow myself to express freely, because tomorrow there’ll be another chance.
Dee Martin
Jamila, thank you so much for being on Madam Policy. Those are all sage and beautiful remarks. I have one more request — if you’ll call me sometime in the beginning of September, after I’ve dropped my daughter off at college, and say it all again, that would be great, I would appreciate that. But really, you’re a remarkable woman. Thank you for spending your time with us today.
Jamila Piracci
It’s my pleasure, and I’ll be calling in tears as well, because I’ll be dropping off my son. These are all things I tell myself that are extremely hard to live. So I’ll be sharing your tears and bittersweetness as we say goodbye. Thank you so much for having me — it’s an honor to speak with you, and I love following your work.
Dee Martin
Thank you so much. Thank you. Thanks for being here.
