Obama pejse e sistemit neoliberal neocnsrevatist qe sot po mbron hillarin dhe kush e beri presid

[HFTengineer]

http://www.newyorker.com/business/cu...revolving-door


The news that Tim Geithner, the former U.S. Treasury Secretary, was hired as president of the private-equity firm Warburg Pincus has inspired a lot of commentary about the “revolving door” between government and Wall Street. Some have wondered what Geithner’s move to Wall Street suggests about his independence during a powerful twenty-five-year career in the U.S. government. Here’s a confession: I’ve been through that revolving door myself. During twelve years in the U.S. financial sector, I went back and forth between the two worlds, working sometimes as a government official and, at other times, as a Wall Street executive.


I argued last week in the Wall Street Journal that my former employer on the government side, the Federal Reserve, has stopped acting independently from Wall Street. Back in the spring of 2003, though, I was only a couple of years into working at the Fed’s New York branch (the New York Fed, for short)—essentially the U.S. central bank’s operational command center. I was still a relatively green attorney supporting the Fed’s various financial-services businesses. Geithner was even newer to the New York Fed than I was. A career bureaucrat at the U.S. Treasury Department and the International Monetary Fund, he was also new to the world of Wall Street—a highly unusual background for a New York Fed president.

Of all places, I met Geithner on a basketball court. The New York Fed’s gym, at its downtown Manhattan headquarters, wasn’t fancy; imagine the dilapidated space those high-schoolers used in the movie “Hoosiers.” The New York Fed’s staffers, myself included, used it for pickup basketball games twice a week. A few months into his new job, Geithner started showing up at our Monday-night sessions. I was immediately impressed by Geithner’s jump shot. It was incredibly accurate—beautiful to watch. Soon, I became even more impressed by Geithner’s exceptional talent for interacting with all of us—a hodge-podge of New York Fed employees ranging from economists to janitors. During the games, he would often remain quiet, appearing to focus intensely on the action. But just when you wondered if he was annoyed by our persistent smack talk, he would let out a quip or a small personal jibe; inevitably, the rest of us would erupt in laughter.

Apparently, Geithner was getting to know Wall Street in the same amiable way he was getting to know all of us. Geithner’s constant calls and contacts with Wall Street during his time as New York Fed president never would have been obvious to someone like me. I was only a junior Federal Reserve officer. I read about them afterward, in the newspaper, like everyone else. But, relatively soon after Geithner began leading the Fed’s New York branch, I was struck by the way in which he was recruiting Wall Street veterans to fill senior roles. When I’d arrived, the New York Fed had been an institution that almost invariably promoted from within its own ranks. Under Geithner’s leadership, the New York Fed now brought in an executive vice-president from JPMorgan Chase to run its corporate group, along with a general auditor from American Express. Most tellingly, he also hired William Dudley, who had previously worked as the chief economist at Goldman Sachs, to run the Fed’s trading floor. It seemed that Geithner’s relative lack of familiarity with the U.S. banking sector was making him lean on Wall Street veterans to compensate. In other words, Geithner hadn’t come through any revolving door himself, but he was building one at the New York Fed.

My last pickup game with the New York Fed president came sometime in 2007. I know because I left the Fed soon afterward. Frustrated with what I perceived as a progressive loss of independence from Wall Street, I decided to try something new. I took a job at an investment bank.

My decision to go to Wall Street was driven mainly by my disappointment with the Fed, not by a desire for money or prestige. This may sound dubious, but in my new environment, I believe that I remained true to my Fed training. If I was now asked to opine on a thorny accounting issue or a questionable trade, I still approached the issue as I would have done as a central banker. I still believed wholeheartedly in the public-service mission of the Fed. Indeed, when the Fed recruited me back to help during the financial crisis, I returned—only to find myself disillusioned all over again. I went back to Wall Street once more, and then finally decided to take a teaching position at a business school and try to help improve the U.S. financial sector from the outside.

In other words, I’ve been through the revolving door myself many times; the experience has taught me that working both on Wall Street and in Washington doesn’t in itself compromise a person’s independence. And yet, watching Geithner from a distance as he continued to lead the New York Fed and then went on to join the Obama Administration, I maintained my belief that he was deferring too much to Wall Street. I’m not talking about his actions during the Bear Stearns and Lehman Brothers meltdowns in 2008, when Geithner helped orchestrate the central bank’s emergency responses. I believe that the Fed—led by its New York branch—did what was needed to stabilize a collapsing U.S. banking sector.

I’m talking instead about Geithner’s time as Treasury Secretary. For all the hope and change promised by the Obama Administration, Geithner’s approach seemed remarkably similar to that of his Republican predecessor, the former Goldman Sachs C.E.O. Hank Paulson. Sure, there were strategic moments of political theater—like when, in December of 2009, Geithner blasted Wall Street for giving out record bonuses a little more than a year after Lehman Brothers’s bankruptcy, telling Bloomberg TV’s Al Hunt that none of the big U.S. banks “would have survived” without government assistance. But, during his entire tenure in Washington, Geithner never publicly advocated for a truly forceful and clean revamp of Wall Street. A return to Glass-Steagall-style reforms that would have re-imposed clear boundaries on the activities of different types of U.S. banks? Forget about it. Instead, Geithner helped usher through Congress the convoluted and less effective Dodd-Frank legislation, much of which we’re still waiting to see implemented. Not surprisingly, the idea persists in the minds of the American public that Washington still isn’t back on the side of Main Street.

In his 2011 book “Confidence Men: Wall Street, Washington, and the Education of a President,” the journalist Ron Suskind wrote that, in March of 2009, President Obama ordered Geithner to prepare a plan for winding down Citigroup—not only one of the world’s biggest banks but one of its most poorly performing. It’s uncertain whether such a breakup would have been feasible, but, if there was a time for the Treasury Department to consider it, here it was. As the story went, Geithner ignored the order.

The Treasury denied Suskind’s narrative. Nevertheless, given what I’ve seen of Geithner’s approach both inside and outside the Fed, the idea behind it seems plausible: Geithner, once a Wall Street neophyte, had become a Wall Street authority, and used that authority to influence President Obama and other lawmakers to be more accommodating to the big banks.

Which brings me back to the topic of Geithner’s new position at Warburg Pincus. Geithner praised the firm, in its press release, for having “an excellent record of performance, a very compelling global strategy, and an ethical reputation of the highest regard.” According to that press release, Geithner will work “on over-all firm strategy and management, investing and portfolio management, organizational and funding structure, and investor relations.” It is unclear, from the news accounts I have seen, whether Geithner’s role will include communicating—formally or informally—with his former colleagues in government on policy issues affecting private-equity firms. Am I worried about the revolving door between Wall Street and Washington? Deeply. But, when it comes to Geithner specifically, my concern at this point isn’t about how Wall Street may have influenced him in the past. I’m more worried by how Geithner—as a revered government veteran on Wall Street—may influence Washington in the future.

[HFTengineer]

http://billmoyers.com/2012/01/23/the...eeps-spinning/


We’ve already made our choice for the best headline of the year, so far: “Citigroup Replaces JPMorgan as White House Chief of Staff.”

When we saw it on the website Gawker.com we had to smile — but the smile didn’t last long. There’s simply too much truth in that headline; it says a lot about how Wall Street and Washington have colluded to create the winner-take-all economy that rewards the very few at the expense of everyone else.


The story behind it is that Jack Lew is President Obama’s new chief of staff — arguably the most powerful office in the White House that isn’t shaped like an oval. He used to work for the giant banking conglomerate Citigroup. His predecessor as chief of staff is Bill Daley, who used to work at the giant banking conglomerate JPMorgan Chase, where he was maestro of the bank’s global lobbying and chief liaison to the White House. Daley replaced Obama’s first chief of staff, Rahm Emanuel, who once worked as a rainmaker for the investment bank now known as Wasserstein & Company, where in less than three years he was paid a reported eighteen and a half million dollars.

The new guy, Jack Lew – said by those who know to be a skilled and principled public servant – ran hedge funds and private equity at Citigroup, which means he’s a member of the Wall Street gang, too. His last job was as head of President Obama’s Office of Management and Budget, where he replaced Peter Orzag, who now works as vice chairman for global banking at – hold on to your deposit slip — Citigroup.

Still with us? It’s startling the number of high-ranking Obama officials who have spun through the revolving door between the White House and the sacred halls of investment banking. Sure, you can argue that it makes sense that the chief executive of the nation would look to other executives for the expertise you need to build back from the disastrous collapse of the banks in the final year of the Bush Administration. Remember — it was Bush and Cheney with their cronies in big business who helped walk us right into the blast furnace of financial meltdown, then rushed to save the banks with taxpayer money. That little fact seems to have been overlooked in the current primaries.

All this brings back memories of Hank Paulson, doesn’t it? Hank Paulson, the $700 million man who became secretary of the treasury for President Bush. Paulson had been head of Goldman Sachs, the rich investment bank. As his successor at Goldman Sachs, Paulson chose Lloyd Blankfein. Several times, according to Bloomberg News, Rolling Stone, and Paulson’s own memoir, the treasury secretary made sure Blankfein and Goldman got privileged inside information.

But Bush and Cheney aren’t the only ones to have a soft spot for financiers. President Obama may call bankers “fat cats” and stir the rabble against them with populist rhetoric when it serves his interest, but after the fiscal fiasco, he allowed the culprits to escape virtually scot-free. When he’s in New York he dines with them frequently and eagerly accepts their big contributions. Like his predecessors, his administration also has provided them with billions of taxpayer dollars – low-cost money that they used for high-yielding investments to make big profits. The largest banks are bigger than they were when he took office and earned more in the first two-and-a-half years of his term than they did during the entire eight years of the Bush administration. That’s confirmed by industry data.

And get this. It turns out, according to The New York Times, that as President Obama’s inner circle has been shrinking, his “rare new best friend” is Robert Wolf. They play basketball, golf, and talk economics when Wolf is not raising money for the president’s campaign.

Robert Wolf runs the U.S. branch of the giant Swiss bank UBS, which participated in schemes to help rich Americans evade their taxes. During hearings in 2009, Michigan’s Senator Carl Levin, chairman of the permanent subcommittee on investigations, described some of the tricks used by UBS: “Swiss bankers aided and abetted violations of U.S. tax law by traveling to this country with client code names, encrypted computers, counter- surveillance training, and all the rest of it, to enable U.S. residents to hide assets and money in Swiss accounts.

“The bankers then returned to Switzerland and treated their conduct as blameless since Swiss law says tax evasion is no crime. The Swiss bank before us deliberately entered United States, actively sought U.S. clients and secretly helped those U.S. clients defraud the United States of America.”

And so it goes, the revolving door between government service and big money in the private sector spinning so fast it becomes an irresistible force hurling politics and high finance together so completely it’s impossible to tell one from the other.

[HFTengineer]

http://www.nytimes.com/1999/02/03/bu...ving-door.html


https://www.propublica.org/article/r...revisited-1119


Last week, we noted that Rahm Emanuel’s brief but profitable stint as an investment banker highlights the revolving door swinging between Washington and Wall Street. Two stories in particular, one from the Chicago Tribune in 2003 and the other from Fortune Magazine in 2006, have detailed Emanuel’s days as a banker, which earned him more than $18 million in less than three years.

Today, Politico examines a major deal Emanuel worked on as the Chicago-based managing director for the now-defunct investment bank Wasserstein Perella, headed by Bruce Wasserstein, a major Democratic donor. The deal involved a $16 billion merger that created Exelon Corp., now one of the nation’s largest electric utilities.

Politico points out that Exelon is in the midst of trying to buy another company, which could create “the nation’s largest power company.” From Politico:

Emanuel’s elevation to the White House comes at a pivotal time for the company he helped create. Exelon is now involved in a hostile takeover bid for the assets of NRG Energy ...

The deal potentially faces a host of regulatory and government approvals, and industry insiders will be watching to see that Exelon is treated fairly by the Obama administration ...

Executives at Exelon declined comment.

An Emanuel representative said that Exelon won’t get any special favors from the White House. “Serving the American people and President Obama is Congressman Emanuel’s only priority,” the representative said.

The Washington Post also recently noted that Emanuel is still close with Exelon’s CEO, John Rowe. Emanuel reportedly called Rowe “while he was shopping at a bookstore and agonizing over the toll that a move back to the White House would take.”