Thursday, February 14, 2013

Obama's Bad Replacement Choice for His Current Bad Treasury Sec

[Jack] Lew was only at Citi for about a year and a half—but it was the year and half leading up to the 2008 financial crash, which also totaled CAI. When Lew walked away from the wreckage, he managed to take his $1.1 million salary and a $900,000 bonus with him—even as Citigroup was becoming a poster child for the Treasury’s new AFDC (Aid to Financially Dependent Corporations) program.

The gory details of how Lew earned his money at Citi (by shorting the housing market, in cahoots with a hedge fund manager who helped Goldman Sachs do the same at the expense of its long clients) have already been well reported, so I won’t reexamine the entrails here.

  Billmon

President Obama won reelection in part by beating up on his opponent for receiving big corporate payouts in exchange for dubious work and for socking away money in tax havens such as the Cayman Islands.

So it’s a bit, well, rich that Obama chose as his new Treasury secretary a man who received a big corporate payout for dubious work and who socked away money in the Cayman Islands.

[...]

Lew, who was White House chief of staff while Obama’s campaign was pummeling Romney over his pay and taxes, received a $945,000 bonus in January 2009 after a brief tenure at Citigroup — just as the bank announced huge losses and took a taxpayer bailout. Lew also invested $56,000 in a Citigroup venture-capital fund registered in the Cayman Islands — registered in the very building[Ugland House], in fact, that Obama labeled “the largest tax scam in the world.”

[...]

“It’s no wonder that maybe you and the president haven’t proposed legislative solutions to what you consider, or what the president considers, a tax scam,” Grassley observed.

[...]

Lew’s confirmation isn’t in doubt, a fact supported by the way he sauntered down the hall to his hearing in the Dirksen Senate Office Building, hands in pockets.

  Dana Milbank - WaPo

They like to take shots at each other, but as long as the end result is the status quo, their arguments are just for show.

Have a quick look at the information available at the time Obama made Lew his Chief of Staff. 

...but hey, do what you want...you will anyway.

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