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Related: Editorials & Other Articles, Issue Forums, Alliance Forums, Region ForumsWhich of Obama's cabinet appointees were from Wall Street?
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Category:Obama_Administration_cabinet_membersI'm on mobile so I may be missing somebody, but I'm coming up blank here.
FreakinDJ
(17,644 posts)Recursion
(56,582 posts)Why do you say Geithner was Wall Street?
Katashi_itto
(10,175 posts)Recursion
(56,582 posts)Come on, you can't seriously blame him for an appointee later going to Wall Street.
Katashi_itto
(10,175 posts)joshcryer
(62,276 posts)Same shit with bundlers. It pays to play.
Hortensis
(58,785 posts)Recursion
(56,582 posts)merrily
(45,251 posts)Recursion
(56,582 posts)He'd spent the rest of his life in the public sector.
Seriously, why do people keep saying he came from Wall Street?
merrily
(45,251 posts)
Geithner worked for Kissinger Associates in Washington for three years and then joined the International Affairs division of the U.S. Treasury Department in 1988. He went on to serve as an attaché at the Embassy of the United States in Tokyo. He was deputy assistant secretary for international monetary and financial policy (19951996), senior deputy assistant secretary for international affairs (19961997), and assistant secretary for international affairs (19971998).[10]
He was Under Secretary of the Treasury for International Affairs (19982001) under Treasury Secretaries Robert Rubin and Lawrence Summers.[10] Summers was his mentor,[18][19] but other sources call him a Rubin protégé.[20][21][22]
.....
In 2001 he left the Treasury to join the Council on Foreign Relations as a Senior Fellow in the International Economics department.[23] He was director of the Policy Development and Review Department (20012003) at the International Monetary Fund.[10]
In October 2003, at age 42,[24] he was named president of the Federal Reserve Bank of New York.[25] His salary in 2007 was $398,200.[26] As President of the New York Fed, he served as Vice Chairman of the Federal Open Market Committee. In 2006, he also became a member of the Washington-based financial advisory body, the Group of Thirty.[27] In May 2007, he worked to reduce the capital required to run a bank.[24] In November he rejected Sanford Weill's offer to take over as Citigroup's chief executive.[24]
In March 2008, he arranged the rescue and sale of Bear Stearns.[18][28] As a Treasury official, he helped manage multiple international crises of the 1990s[21] in Brazil, Mexico, Indonesia, South Korea, and Thailand.[22]
Geithner believed, along with Henry Paulson (of Goldman Sachs), that the U.S. Department of the Treasury needed new authority to experiment with responses to the late-2000s (decade) financial crisis.[18] Paulson described Geithner as a "very unusually talented young man...[who] understands government and understands markets".[28]
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Timothy_Geithner
People who want to keep reading Geithner's wiki can look at Geithner's role in the bailout and the AIG Bonuses, even before Obama took office.
Recursion
(56,582 posts)I'm not playing; I'm genuinely mystified.
merrily
(45,251 posts)Recursion
(56,582 posts)If I've been wrong in taking it to mean "private equity and investment banking" (like I'm pretty sure most people mean) in the context of DU, then tell me what it does mean.
treestar
(82,383 posts)So you're claiming it is not meant "literally" that they all came from Wall Street.
merrily
(45,251 posts)TM99
(8,352 posts)connections including Federal Reserve, Central Banking, equity and large banking firms, law firms, other corporate entities, etc. From government to Wall Street or from Wall Street to government. Back and forth and around and around.
Stop playing games. You know this.
This is what we progressives are complaining about.
merrily
(45,251 posts)Recursion
(56,582 posts)One person who came to Obama's cabinet from Wall Street.
TM99
(8,352 posts)You seem reasonably intelligent. I think you can find more.
Not interested in playing this game with you.
Recursion
(56,582 posts)I would like someone who came to Obama's Cabinet after having worked for a Wall Street firm. Name one.
Response to Recursion (Reply #17)
merrily This message was self-deleted by its author.
think
(11,641 posts)So even though Holder doesn't technically work on Wall Street his firm represents them as lobbyist and legal council. They even kept his seat empty the corporate law firm Covington & Burling while he was in the Obama administration for six years.
After leaving the Clinton Administration, Lew worked as the Executive Vice President for Operations at New York University from 2001 to 2006, and as the COO at Citigroup from 2006 to 2008. Lew then served as the first Deputy Secretary of State for Management and Resources, from 2009 to 2010.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jack_Lew
After the end of the Clinton administration in 2001, Froman followed Robert Rubin from the Treasury Department to Citigroup.[10] He was President and Chief Executive Officer of CitiInsurance and head of Emerging Markets Strategy at Citigroup, managing infrastructure and sustainable development investments.[2] He received more than $7.4 million from January 2008 to 2009 alone.[11]
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Michael_Froman
Holder will reassume his lucrative partnership (he made $2.5 million the last year he worked there) and take his seat in an office that reportedly this is no joke was kept empty for him in his absence.
~Snip~
Here's a man who just spent six years handing out soft-touch settlements to practically every Too Big to Fail bank in the world. Now he returns to a firm that represents many of those same companies: Morgan Stanley, Wells Fargo, Chase, Bank of America and Citigroup, to name a few.
~Snip~
Here are five pillars of the Holder revolution:
One is that he failed to win a single conviction in court for any crimes related to the financial crisis. The only trial of any consequence brought by his Justice Department for crimes related to the crisis involved a pair of Bear Stearns nimrods named Ralph Cioffi and Matthew Tannin, who confided in each other via email that the subprime markets were "toast" but told their clients something very different to keep them invested.
After a jury acquitted both in early 2009, the Holder Justice Department turtled. Sources inside the DOJ told me over the years that both Holder and his deputy, fellow Covington & Burling alum Lanny Breuer, were obsessed with winning and refused to chance any case where they felt a jury might go sideways on them. Thus the Cioffi-Tannin case was the last financial crisis case they dared to bring into to a criminal courtroom virtually every other case ended in settlements.
Two: Holder famously invented a concept called "collateral consequences," under which the state could pursue non-criminal alternatives for companies if they believed prosecuting them might result in too much "collateral" damage. Britain's HSBC bank, which admitted to massive money laundering violations, and the Swiss bank UBS, which was caught manipulating the Libor interest rate benchmark, were examples of firms that escaped vigorous prosecution because Holder and his lackeys were, ostensibly anyway, concerned about market-altering consequences.
Significantly, both banks were later caught up in even more serious scandals, leading to criticism that stiffer punishments the first time around might have prevented future damage. Holder's successor Loretta Lynch was even forced to rip up Holder's UBS deal for being insufficiently punitive. It's worth noting that Holder, before he became attorney general, represented UBS at Covington & Burling...
Read more: http://www.rollingstone.com/politics/news/eric-holder-wall-street-double-agent-comes-in-from-the-cold-20150708#ixzz3mwW5AEoe
Recursion
(56,582 posts)I'll check out Froman; I know next to nothing about him.
treestar
(82,383 posts)Rather than admit none of them really came from Wall Street.
OMG it's ridiculous.
TM99
(8,352 posts)instead of peddling this?
It is ridiculous, that is for sure!
Bonobo
(29,257 posts)Japan[edit]
Amakudari (天下り amakudari?, "descent from heaven" is the institutionalized practice where Japanese senior bureaucrats retire to high-profile positions in the private and public sectors. The practice was increasingly viewed as corrupt and a drag on unfastening the ties between private sector and state which prevent economic and political reforms.
It is the same in the US. The revolving door goes both ways.
Ilsa
(61,695 posts)She was in a white shoe law firm between being stints as a US attorney. Are you seriously counting the fact that the firm she worked for had banks as clients?
Ilsa
(61,695 posts)an Arthur Andersen accountant who assisted in cooking ENRON's books.
She's been on the AG side and the defense side, from what I've read, and her fine on HSBC was a few percentage points of what they made from their illegal activities.
Is she the worst choice? Certainly not. Possibly the best. It just goes to show how difficult it is to find a person for the job that hasn't been on both sides during their career. So don't get upset for me pointing out her history.
Octafish
(55,745 posts)Technically, she's got her own bank.
An Interview with Tim Anderson on Obama's Commerce Nominee, Penny Pritzker, the Sub-Prime Queen
The Privilege of the Pritzkers
by DENNIS BERNSTEIN
CounterPunch, May 3-5, 2013
EXCERPT...
TA: $38 billion. One publication listed eight casinos, another listed 13, with each license worth a half a million dollars. There is another $5-7 billion in casinos. When you own 13 casinos for 5-7 billion, you are a player in the casino business. Thats just the hotels and casinos. There are many other companies they own such as the second largest chewing tobacco company, which they sold for 3.5 billion dollars. They actually owned the second and third largest chewing tobacco company, but have since off-loaded those for billions of dollars. Many of their assets are not what society considers clean assets, but hey dont care. As far as money goes, they want it. When it comes to casinos or chewing tobacco companies, they dont care. Their wealth is almost incalculable, because according to Forbes magazine, they are the only family in America to have off shore tax-free trusts because they were grandfathered in. Their off shore trust can ship money back to their family tax-free. It was grandfathered in because their grandfather got it through Congress he was smart to see the future and got it done. Congress closed the loophole and grandfathered him in. Forbesmagazine wrote about the Pritzkers off shore trust, they emphasized that there are over 1000 separate trusts. Many families have two or three different savings accounts to keep track of what money belongs to who, but when you have over 1000 different trusts to handle the family estate its very hard to comprehend how much wealth there is and how many businesses they control. A few years ago, Penny sold TransUnion, the largest credit reporting agency in America, but theres a question about whether she sold it to herself by selling it to various hedge funds which her family has a large interest in. Until she sold it, you could say that Penny Pritzker had more files on every citizen in America than the CIA and FBI combined, because everybody has a credit score and credit report. Penny Pritzker had the credit scores and report on every single citizen in America.
SNIP...
TA: She had TransUnion while she had Superior Bank, so she controlled the credit scores of everybody who was getting a subprime loan. You pay a higher interest on your subprime loan based on your credit score. Whether or not it was ever brokered between the credit bureau and the bank, we dont know, but we know the same people control both entities.
SNIP...
TA: Superior Bank was acquired back in 1989 as part of the original savings and loan giveaway by M, D and E Wall. As I wrote a in a paper for an economic conference in Denver, Superior Bank was sold to the Pritzkers for 42.5 million dollars. They changed the name from Lion Savings and Loan to Superior Bank after they acquired it. Lion Savings and Loan was sold to the Pritzkers just to put up money for the capital. But as government reports show, they only put up a million dollars cash and pledged their assets as the difference, the capital. Thats not supposed to be done, but they are privileged people so they get privileged deals. After they acquired this for $1 million they also got $640 million in tax credits.
SNIP...
TA: The tax credits were designed so they could use it in any entity they wanted. They didnt have to use it on what they bought. It could be sold on the open market for value, the credits could be used to file back taxes or warehouse them for future taxes. So for a million dollars, they got 640 million dollars for agreeing to take over Superior Bank, which they then looted for years then gave it back to the government with an enormous loss to the uninsured depositors and the whole subprime industry.
CONTINUED...
http://www.counterpunch.org/2013/05/03/the-privilege-of-the-pritzkers/
How about Jacob Lew?
William K. Black explains how Dr. Wall Street will continue bleeding the patient with leaches to health through austerity.
President Obama and Jacob L. "Jack" Lew walk near Marine One.
Jacob Lew: Another Brick in the Wall Street on the Potomac
William K. Black
Assoc. Professor, Univ. of Missouri, Kansas City; Sr. regulator during S&L debacle
EXCERPT...
The unobvious aspects of the pattern compound these problems. First, Obama likes to surround himself with failures. Geithner set the pattern. He was supposed to be the principal regulator of most of the largest U.S. bank holding companies. He was an abject failure. His speeches and his statements at the Federal Reserve System's FOMC meetings during the crisis demonstrate that he remained clueless to the end. For reasons of brevity, I discuss only three of his failures as Treasury Secretary below.
Lew has gone from failure to failure. He was one of the architects of both of the Clinton administration's disastrous statutory deregulatory actions that helped produce the epidemic of accounting control fraud that drove the Great Recession.
Emanuel and Daley were failures as directors of Fannie and Freddie. Lew was a failure at Citicorp's proprietary derivatives trading arm. That failure is particularly dangerous because the purpose of the Volcker rule was to ensure that federally insured banks did not take proprietary positions in derivatives. Obama has put failed anti-regulators in positions where they can best undermine the reregulatory effort that is essential to reduce the risk and harm of future crises.
Obama's senior financial advisors have also failed ethically. Lew's great moral challenge was whether he would be honest about his errors. Honesty is essential to preventing future harm. Lew failed this second, less obvious, test as well. The CBS special notes:
CONTINUED w/Links...
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/william-k-black/jacob-lew-another-brick-i_b_2446848.html
How many hard working, sincere people have been tossed from their homes over the last seven years? Oh well.
As for the President's Cabinet, take those who get paid to leave Wall Street to work in Washington. Please.
Michael Froman and the revolving door
By Felix Salmon December 11, 2009
Michael Froman is one of those behind-the-scenes technocrats who never quite makes it into full public view. But according to Matt Taibbi, hes one of the most egregious examples up there with Bob Rubin, literally weve yet seen of the way the revolving door works between business and government generally, and between Citigroup and Treasury in particular.
Im not sure how much of this information is new, but a lot of it was new to me, especially the bit about Froman leading the search for the presidents new economic team while he was still pulling down a multi-million-dollar salary at Citigroup, no less. Apologies for quoting at length:
Leading the search for the presidents new economic team was his close friend and Harvard Law classmate Michael Froman, a high-ranking executive at Citigroup. During the campaign, Froman had emerged as one of Obamas biggest fundraisers, bundling $200,000 in contributions and introducing the candidate to a host of heavy hitters chief among them his mentor Bob Rubin, the former co-chairman of Goldman Sachs who served as Treasury secretary under Bill Clinton. Froman had served as chief of staff to Rubin at Treasury, and had followed his boss when Rubin left the Clinton administration to serve as a senior counselor to Citigroup (a massive new financial conglomerate created by deregulatory moves pushed through by Rubin himself).
Incredibly, Froman did not resign from the bank when he went to work for Obama: He remained in the employ of Citigroup for two more months, even as he helped appoint the very people who would shape the future of his own firm. And to help him pick Obamas economic team, Froman brought in none other than Jamie Rubin, a former Clinton diplomat who happens to be Bob Rubins son. At the time, Jamies dad was still earning roughly $15 million a year working for Citigroup, which was in the midst of a collapse brought on in part because Rubin had pushed the bank to invest heavily in mortgage-backed CDOs and other risky instruments
On November 23rd, 2008, a deal is announced in which the government will bail out Rubins messes at Citigroup with a massive buffet of taxpayer-funded cash and guarantees No Citi executives are replaced, and few restrictions are placed on their compensation. Its the sweetheart deal of the century, putting generations of working-stiff taxpayers on the hook to pay off Bob Rubins fuck-up-rich tenure at Citi. If you had any doubts at all about the primacy of Wall Street over Main Street, former labor secretary Robert Reich declares when the bailout is announced, your doubts should be laid to rest.
It is bad enough that one of Bob Rubins former protégés from the Clinton years, the New York Fed chief Geithner, is intimately involved in the negotiations, which unsurprisingly leave the Federal Reserve massively exposed to future Citi losses. But the real stunner comes only hours after the bailout deal is struck, when the Obama transition team makes a cheerful announcement: Timothy Geithner is going to be Barack Obamas Treasury secretary!
Geithner, in other words, is hired to head the U.S. Treasury by an executive from Citigroup Michael Froman before the ink is even dry on a massive government giveaway to Citigroup that Geithner himself was instrumental in delivering. In the annals of brazen political swindles, this one has to go in the all-time Fuck-the-Optics Hall of Fame.
Wall Street loved the Citi bailout and the Geithner nomination so much that the Dow immediately posted its biggest two-day jump since 1987, rising 11.8 percent. Citi shares jumped 58 percent in a single day, and JP Morgan Chase, Merrill Lynch and Morgan Stanley soared more than 20 percent, as Wall Street embraced the news that the governments bailout generosity would not die with George W. Bush and Hank Paulson.
How much influence did Froman have over the appointment of Geithner as Treasury secretary? Geithner, who wanted to become Treasury secretary and who as New York Fed president was a central (if not the central) figure in orchestrating the massive Citigroup bailout just after the election, knew what Fromans job was in the Obama transition team, and knew that Froman was a senior executive at Citigroup.
CONTINUED...
http://blogs.reuters.com/felix-salmon/2009/12/11/michael-froman-and-the-revolving-door/
Dual Citizenship in Wall Street and Washington is more than a physical address. It's a state of mind.
Recursion
(56,582 posts)If so then, yes, Pritzker was chairperson for a hot minute of a retail bank her uncle bought until the other partner forced her out. I've never heard somebody call a Chicago retail bank "Wall Street" before.
Octafish
(55,745 posts)The Shocking Redistribution of Wealth in the Past Five Years
by Paul Buchheit
Published on Monday, December 30, 2013 by Common Dreams
Anyone reviewing the data is likely to conclude that there must be some mistake. It doesn't seem possible that one out of twenty American families could each have made a million dollars since Obama became President, while the average American family's net worth has barely recovered. But the evidence comes from numerous reputable sources.
Some conservatives continue to claim that President Obama is unfriendly to business, but the facts show that the richest Americans and the biggest businesses have been the main - perhaps only - beneficiaries of the massive wealth gain over the past five years.
1. $5 Million to Each of the 1%, and $1 Million to Each of the Next 4%
From the end of 2008 to the middle of 2013 total U.S. wealth increased from $47 trillion to $72 trillion. About $16 trillion of that is financial gain (stocks and other financial instruments).
The richest 1% own about 38 percent of stocks, and half of non-stock financial assets. So they've gained at least $6.1 trillion (38 percent of $16 trillion). That's over $5 million for each of 1.2 million households.
The next richest 4%, based on similar calculations, gained about $5.1 trillion. That's over a million dollars for each of their 4.8 million households.
The least wealthy 90% in our country own only 11 percent of all stocks excluding pensions (which are fast disappearing). The frantic recent surge in the stock market has largely bypassed these families.
2. Evidence of Our Growing Wealth Inequality
This first fact is nearly ungraspable: In 2009 the average wealth for almost half of American families was ZERO (their debt exceeded their assets).
In 1983 the families in America's poorer half owned an average of about $15,000. But from 1983 to 1989 median wealth fell from over $70,000 to about $60,000. From 1998 to 2009, fully 80% of American families LOST wealth. They had to borrow to stay afloat.
It seems the disparity couldn't get much worse, but after the recession it did. According to a Pew Research Center study, in the first two years of recovery the mean net worth of households in the upper 7% of the wealth distribution rose by an estimated 28%, while the mean net worth of households in the lower 93% dropped by 4%. And then, from 2011 to 2013, the stock market grew by almost 50 percent, with again the great majority of that gain going to the richest 5%.
Today our wealth gap is worse than that of the third world. Out of all developed and undeveloped countries with at least a quarter-million adults, the U.S. has the 4th-highest degree of wealth inequality in the world, trailing only Russia, Ukraine, and Lebanon.
3. Congress' Solution: Take from the Poor
Congress has responded by cutting unemployment benefits and food stamps, along with other 'sequester' targets like Meals on Wheels for seniors and Head Start for preschoolers. The more the super-rich make, the more they seem to believe in the cruel fantasy that the poor are to blame for their own struggles.
President Obama recently proclaimed that inequality "drives everything I do in this office." Indeed it may, but in the wrong direction.
FORUM HOSTS, PLEASE NOTE: This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 3.0 License.
Paul Buchheit is a college teacher, an active member of US Uncut Chicago, founder and developer of social justice and educational websites (UsAgainstGreed.org, PayUpNow.org, RappingHistory.org), and the editor and main author of "American Wars: Illusions and Realities" (Clarity Press). He can be reached at paul@UsAgainstGreed.org.
Original Article from two years back, almost: http://www.commondreams.org/view/2013/12/30-0
Bluenorthwest
(45,319 posts)This is similar to 'Hollywood' which contain very little of the entertainment business that is called 'Hollywood' be it done in the place or not, usually not.
'Madison Avenue' means advertising, 'K Street' means lobbying.
It's really not all that difficult to grasp. Industries get named after the place they grow roots and remain named by that place no matter where the branches grow. Hard to imagine that you really think 'Hollywood' is the geographic location of all show biz called 'Hollywood'.
Recursion
(56,582 posts)As in, private equity and investment banking.
"Wall Street" is usually used as a contrast to retail banking.
'K Street' means lobbying
Exactly. And this is like calling a think tank "K street" because it writes about policy.
joshcryer
(62,276 posts)Anyone else?
I mean I think the OP is being somewhat controversial but people are really riled up here.
Hell, I'll lower the bar, throw out some names so I can look in to them.
Recursion
(56,582 posts)And then there's Froman; in that case I wasn't thinking of USTR as a Cabinet appointment, which it is.
mopinko
(70,132 posts)dont go confusing people w facts, tho. it could go badly. lol.
joshcryer
(62,276 posts)Just because it's riled up people without being reasonable about it.
stonecutter357
(12,697 posts)treestar
(82,383 posts)the rage against anybody who made a success of themselves is telling. Goes right into Freeper hands. Yet they keep doing it.
mmonk
(52,589 posts)and Greenspan and financial deregulation can't be called Wall Street? This is the reason I'm leaving the party to be an unaffiliated progressive. Cognitive dissonance is the rule in both parties from too many. We can't afford it anymore.