The cooling-off period is over for former Treasury Secretary Tim Geithner, who is joining the private equity firm Warburg Pincus as president and managing director. Geithner had initially joined the Council on Foreign Relations as a senior fellow after leaving the Treasury Department early this year. He had taken several plum speaking engagements at Wall …
Tag: Larry Summers
The Summers “Aura of Wrongness”
Larry Summers, former Obama economic adviser and a leading candidate for World Bank president, neatly sums up the problem of regulatory capture in Washington, reflecting on his time at the Clinton Treasury: It was the practice of the Treasury to take advice from investment banks on bond market issues from others with a stake in …
Celebrating Ten Years of Derivatives Deregulation
Today marks the tenth anniversary of President Clinton’s signing of the Commodity Futures Modernization Act (CFMA). At passage, the bill was said to establish “legal certainty” for derivatives. In other words, the bill assured bankers that they wouldn’t face any legal consequences in the United States when they manipulated, defrauded, and colluded their way to …
September 11, 1989
It wasn’t my intention, launching LittleSis with Kevin in January 2009, to be so consistently absent from our blog. Early on we made the decision to divide up our growing organizational responsibilities, with Kevin taking on research, writing, and outreach — the activity that keeps LittleSis fresh — while I focused on adding to our …
Project update: over 100 White House visitors profiled
Last Thursday, inspired by the release of White House visitor logs, we launched a new project to compile information on visitors to the Obama White House. In less than a week, analysts Priscilla, sundin, ellenp, and destructor have built and updated profiles for over 100 individuals who have met with the president or one of …
A closer look at a toxic avenger
To paraphrase Paul Krugman, it looks like the zombies have won. Insolvent banks continue to roam the earth, sucking up unfathomable sums of taxpayer capital, provided to hedge fund intermediaries as nonrecourse loans. The scheme is designed to create inflated “auction” prices by incentivizing investors to over-bid on assets which carry almost no downside risk …