Earlier this week, Bloomberg reported that former Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner secured a line of credit from JPMorgan Chase, one of the too-big-to-fail recipients of bailout cash. Geithner is looking to buy in to a new $12 billion fund at Warburg Pincus, the private equity firm where he now works. He reportedly stands to make …
Tag: robert rubin
Geithner does the Rubin Shuffle
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 …
Ex-Goldman Trader Bought Major Stake in ACA, Shorted Subprime CDOs
The Goldman-Paulson fraud suit threatens to throw a spotlight on a realm of Wall Street that has escaped most scrutiny throughout the financial crisis: the hedge fund industry. Top hedge fund managers profit from Wall Street’s business model of fraud and collusion more than any CEO at the big banks, but tend to evade accountability …
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 …
Searching for Bobby Rubin
With the Geithner “wunderkind” and Summers “socratic genius” brands badly damaged, Obama faces pressure from a broad and growing spectrum to find new front men for his economic policy team. This was in evidence last week when Paul Volcker and Austan Goolsbee were trucked in from oblivion to champion Obama’s new bank reform agenda. Volcker …
Geithner’s Big Lie
The front page of the New York Times says it all this morning: “The treasury secretary told a House panel that failure to provide A.I.G. with the $85 billion bailout would have been “catastrophic” for the economy.” Both Paulson and Geithner also defended their actions with the old warning about the imminence of a “second …
Fending off the Bernanke downgrade
Ben Bernanke’s supporters are warning that a Senate vote against the Fed chair will send financial markets tumbling. Tim Geithner recently chimed in by telling Politico that markets would find a no vote “very troubling,” before saying that he was confident Bernanke would be reconfirmed. Geithner’s chief mentor, Robert Rubin, deployed the very same argument …
Understanding Rubin
Matt Taibbi includes a devastating analysis of the role that Robert Rubin has played in shaping this young administration in his latest piece for Rolling Stone, Obama’s Big Sellout: Despite being perhaps more responsible for last year’s crash than any other single living person — his colossally stupid decisions at both the highest levels of …
Citigroup’s dance with Dubai
While the American economy sank, Citigroup put US taxpayer money to work helping to sustain the Dubai bubble. In December 2008, just weeks after Citigroup needed a second government bailout on top of the $25 billion it received through TARP, the bank made an $8 billion loan to Dubai. It is believed to have $1.9 billion …
Hormats on Rubin
It should be no surprise that State Dept nominee Robert Hormats and Robert Rubin are well-acquainted, both Bobs having served their country at Goldman Sachs during the eighties. During the nineties, when Rubin was in the Clinton administration, they were a sort of Washington-Wall Street tandem, consistently agreeing on what was best for global financial …
Goldman Sachs’ White House ties run deep
While Goldman Sachs‘ managing partners prepare their lists for Fifth Avenue shopping sprees on bonus day, the firm’s public relations department is grappling with an image problem that has some staying power. Goldman’s record profiteering at a time of chronic unemployment and systemic crisis along with Matt Taibbi’s superb article on Goldman’s role in market …
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 …