PIMCO’s handshake with Kashkari

Neel Kashkari, ex-Treasury Secretary Henry Paulson‘s pick to oversee TARP, has joined the bond firm PIMCO, the trillion dollar bond manager based in southern California.  The move comes just days after the Washington Post ran a lengthy profile of Kashkari and his life after Treasury. Felix Salmon notes that with the move, PIMCO has cemented …

Read More

Wall Street’s tunnel to the White House

Are Treasury officials and their friends able to avoid appearing on the White House’s newly-released visitor logs? I raise this question because there is a tunnel between the White House and the Treasury Department, and it appears to be used quite frequently by members of the administration’s economic team. See this New York Times article …

Read More

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 …

Read More

DeLong has a little brother in this fight

Since the Obama administration leaked details of its toxic asset plan on Friday night, the reaction in the blogosphere has been swift and harshly critical: the zombie plans have won, writes Paul Krugman; it’s a Rube Goldberg device for shifting losses to the Treasury, writes James K Galbraith; really bad ideas, writes Atrios. There has, …

Read More