Six years later, the echoes of the financial crisis are still audible: Banks continue to be fined for misbehavior, regulators continue to rewrite new financial rules, and the public remains mistrustful of Wall Street.

Yet Tim Massad, chair of the Commodity Futures Trading Commission, believes all this activity – albeit unfinished - is building toward more stable and trustworthy financial markets.

“We’ve got to get back to a reality, as well as a perception, that the markets are not only fair but that they are an engine of growth for our economy. They’re not simply a source of profit on Wall Street,” Massad said in an interview from the Global Financial Leadership Conference in Naples, Fla, this month. “We’re making good progress on that.”

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Massad, who took the job leading the CFTC in June, helped oversee the Treasury Department's Troubled Asset Relief Program in the immediate crisis aftermath, and previously worked as a private-sector lawyer on financial matters including derivatives.

The CFTC, which regulates futures markets, was among the agencies to force a $4.3 billion settlement this month with six global banks over alleged manipulation of the foreign exchange market. The CFTC has also been at the center of the effort to create a central, public clearing process for the vast over-the-counter swaps market, an opaque area of bank-dominated trading that regulators have long worried could be a source of systemic risk.

Massad’s comments about regulation steering markets back toward productive economic purposes rather than arenas for Wall Street to rack up trading profits represent a common theme of his. He cites end users and producers of agricultural, energy and financial products that underlie futures as key constituencies in designing trading and disclosure rules.

There have been some concerns in the financial industry that banks and other dealers will choose to curtail their trading activities to the detriment of market liquidity. Many bond dealers have vastly reduced their market-making in corporate bonds due to stricter capital rules, and Deutsche Bank recently elected to cut back severely in trading of credit-default swaps.

Massad, for his part, is unconcerned that markets have been thinned out too much. “These are very liquid, very deep markets,” he says.

What does concern him is his agency’s tight budget for market-regulation and enforcement activities. He has been openly arguing that the current CFTC budget ”falls very short” of what’s needed for it to be effective in its mission.

“As I say to all our staff, we’re going to do all we can with what we have, but we are stretched relatively thin,” he says. New laws on regulation have given the CFTC considerably more responsibilities for oversight, but “the budget wasn’t really increased.”

Critics in finance have long complained that splitting regulation of financial markets between the CFTC and the Securities and Exchange Commission is inefficient and in some instances counterproductive. In the post-crisis regulatory overhaul, there was more talk of combining their functions within the larger, better-funded SEC, and SEC Chair Mary Jo White joked at a recent industry gathering that she’d be glad to absorb the CFTC.

The CFTC has historically been protected by those in Congress who are close to agricultural interests and to the Chicago futures-trading powerhouses.

Yet Massad says, “It’s the way it was created, it’s the way it’s grown up. There are different traditions that lie behind the fact that we have two agencies.

“It’s ultimately up to Congress,” he adds. “But in the meantime I have enough to do in my job to not worry about those hypothetical questions.”

Indeed he does - six years after the crisis, and counting.