Jack Lew will be the next Treasury Secretary

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Jack Lew To Be Nominated For Treasury Secretary By Obama: Report

 

[88m3]

Well from reading the article the guy sounds like a corporate shill and unqualified...

 

[Julius Skrrvin]

 

[Pawn]

 

[Colilluminati]

Citi paid Lew $1.1 million for his year at Alternative Investments, according to an ethics disclosure report filed in January 2009. He was also eligible for an undisclosed bonus. Lew did not immediately return a call for comment.
His unit, though, lost as much as billions of dollars in 2008 as its bets turned sour. In the first quarter of 2008 alone the unit lost $509 million; the company stopped publicly disclosing the unit's individual numbers soon thereafter, but the part of the company that absorbed Alternative Investments lost $20.1 billion in 2008, according to the bank's filings with the Securities and Exchange Commission.
Citigroup, the nation's third-largest bank, received $45 billion in TARP bailout funds that year.

 

[88m3]

Obama Plans to Name Jacob J. Lew as Treasury Secretary, Officials Say
By JACKIE CALMES and ANNIE LOWREY
Published: January 9, 2013 48 Comments
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WASHINGTON – President Obama will announce on Thursday that he intends to elevate his chief of staff and former budget director, Jacob J. Lew, to be his next secretary of Treasury, according to people familiar with the decision.
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Doug Mills/The New York Times
Jacob J. Lew at the White House on Monday.
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Economix Blog: Continuity on Obama's Economic Team (January 9, 2013)
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If confirmed by the Senate, Mr. Lew, 57, would be Mr. Obama’s second Treasury secretary, replacing Timothy F. Geithner, the last remaining principal on Mr. Obama’s original economic team, at the head of that team.

While Mr. Lew has much less experience than Mr. Geithner in international economics and financial markets, he would come to the job with far more expertise in fiscal policy and in dealing with Congress than Mr. Geithner did when he became secretary at the start of Mr. Obama’s term. That shift in skills reflects the changed demands of the times, as emphasis has shifted from the global recession and financial crisis of the president’s first years to the continuing budget fights with Republicans in Congress to stabilize the growth of federal debt.

The partisan tension over the budget between Mr. Obama and Republicans suggests that Mr. Lew will face a grilling by Senate Republicans in confirmation hearings. But despite weeks of speculation that Mr. Lew would be named Treasury secretary, Republicans have not signaled that they plan to mount the kind of opposition they raised to Mr. Obama’s potential nomination of Susan E. Rice, the ambassador to the United Nations, for secretary of state, and Chuck Hagel as secretary of defense; the president named Mr. Hagel on Monday, and eventually settled on Senator John F. Kerry, Democrat of Massachusetts, for secretary of state.

Mr. Lew’s departure would create an important vacancy for what would be Mr. Obama’s fifth White House chief of staff, a turnover rate that is in contrast with the stability at Mr. Geithner’s Treasury. The leading candidate is said to be Denis McDonough, currently the deputy national security adviser in the White House.

Mr. Lew had a brief turn in the financial industry before joining the Obama administration four years ago, working at the financial giant Citicorp, first as managing director of Citi Global Wealth Management and then as chief operating officer of Citigroup Alternative Investments.

His first job with Mr. Obama was at the State Department, where Mr. Lew was the deputy secretary responsible for managing day-to-day operations of the department and its international economic policy. Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton protested to Mr. Obama when the president in 2010 tapped Mr. Lew to replace Peter R. Orszag as budget director.

It was Mr. Lew’s second stint heading the Office of Management and Budget. He previously served in President Bill Clinton’s second term, helping to negotiate a bipartisan budget deal with Congressional Republicans that led to four years of budget surpluses. In the 1980s, Mr. Lew was a senior aide to House Speaker Thomas P. O’Neill, a Democrat, also advising in budget negotiations with President Ronald Reagan.

He has been deeply involved in the deficit negotiations over the last two years. And, if he were quickly confirmed, as Treasury secretary his first test could come as soon as next month, when analysts expect a fight over raising the debt ceiling, which is the legal limit on the amount that the government can borrow.

Republican leaders have said they would refuse to raise the ceiling unless Mr. Obama agrees to equal spending cuts, particularly in entitlement programs like Medicare and Social Security. Mr. Obama has said that he will not negotiate over the ceiling, with the country’s full faith and credit at stake.

With battle lines already drawn, the country is expected to run out of room under the ceiling sometime between mid-February and March. At that point, Congress would need to raise the borrowing limit, or the country would start defaulting on obligated payments, like those promised to seniors, doctors, contractors and bondholders.

Mr. Lew’s role as an Obama negotiator in 2011 did not endear him to Republicans, in particular House Speaker John A. Boehner, and he took a lower-profile role in the most recent negotiations at year-end. The White House was eager to avoid controversy given the likelihood of Mr. Lew’s nomination to Treasury. Instead Mr. Geithner and Rob Nabors, the director of legislative affairs, were lead negotiators.

Mr. Lew, a native of New York, is known for his low-key, professorial style and organizational skills. While he was a favorite of Mr. Obama and other staff members as chief of staff, Mr. Lew made it known that he did not want to continue in that post for a second term.

http://www.nytimes.com/2013/01/10/u...-treasury-secretary.html?smid=fb-nytimes&_r=0

 

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[88m3]

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[No1]

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Lew once said he doesn't believe that deregulation lead to the financial crisis. Now I didn't hear the entire comment or read it all, but I remember that shyt. He could've meant that it wasn't on deregulation entirely, but given how my friends are acting, probably not. He's also from that banking tree. Someone can correct me, but I think Lew comes out of Citigroup.

 

[88m3]

Lew once said he doesn't believe that deregulation lead to the financial crisis. Now I didn't hear the entire comment or read it all, but I remember that shyt. He could've meant that it wasn't on deregulation entirely, but given how my friends are acting, probably not. He's also from that banking tree. Someone can correct me, but I think Lew comes out of Citigroup.

Yes Citigroup. He actively worked for bank deregulation. He was also part of an arm of Citigroup that lost between 10-20 Billon dollars dealing with mortgage backed securities.

 

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Jack Lew To Be Nominated For Treasury Secretary By Obama: Report

Do you feel this was an ethical decision by the President?

 

[No1]

Do you feel this was an ethical decision by the President?

Define ethical, ethical in the context of Washington or ethical in general. Here's two takes on him, the first is less harsh than the second:

It was Lew who devised and, along with White House congressional liaison Rob Nabors, executed the strategy of accepting large-looking cuts to the 2011 budget—that’s the one Republicans nearly shut the government down over last March and April—while implementing the cuts in ways that avoided real pain. (Much of the phantom cutting affected money that had been assigned to certain “mandatory” spending programs, like children’s health insurance, but wasn’t likely to be spent in 2011 anyway.) In this way, the president was able to give John Boehner and the House Republicans the $38 billion in cuts they were demanding, while mostly shielding the fragile economy. As one top White House official put it while I was reporting out my forthcoming book on Obama’s economic team, “Look at the deal. Boehner and his guys got snookered by Rob Nabors and Jack Lew. … We protected what we wanted to protect.” (Anyone interested can pre-order my book on Amazon so they get it on Feb. 28.)

As for whether liberals will warm to Lew, my reporting suggests it could cut either way. On the one hand, Lew has a well-deserved reputation for defending programs that serve the poor, particularly Medicaid. On the other hand, as I elaborate on in my book, Lew and Treasury Secretary Tim Geithner were the administration’s chief proponents of accepting cuts to Medicare during last year's ceaseless deficit-bargaining with Republicans. Lew's enthusiasm for making a deal on Medicare was such that it prompted considerable grumbling in progressive circles.

There’s also the question of whether accommodating the GOP’s demands for large-looking cuts, even while minimizing them in practice, was as successful strategically as it was tactically. One could argue, after all, that the approach shifted the conversation entirely in the direction of cuts for much of the year, which wasn’t exactly a smashing success. I litigate this at some length in the book. (In fairness, the top political operatives, like David Plouffe and Daley, deserve much more credit/blame for the strategic portion of this calculus than Lew, who was operating on a more tactical level.)

For what it’s worth, one thing I don’t think liberals should get too exercised about, though they probably will, is Lew’s tenure at Citigroup, where he worked between 2006 and 2008. Lew was basically the chief administrator at Citi Alternative Investments, which runs the company’s portfolio of hedge funds and private-equity funds. That is, he was the guy who kept watch over the books and the paperwork, not a guy going out and placing multimillion-dollar bets or making hundred-million dollar deals. “He was not commercial,” one former Citi colleague told me for my book, using the Wall Street term of art for “business-minded.” “You’d trust him with your life, but he was not commercial.”

n 2010, Lew became head of the Office of Management and Budget when Peter Orszag left and then, a couple months later, accepted a multi-million dollar position as a high-level Citigroup official. Lew has spent many years in various government positions, but he has his own substantial ties to Citigroup. Here is what Lew was doing in 2008 at the time the financial crisis exploded, as detailed by an excellent Huffington Post report from last year:

[Lew] oversaw a Citigroup unit that profited off the housing collapse and financial crisis by investing in a hedge fund king who correctly predicted the eventual subprime meltdown and now finds himself involved in the center of the U.S. government’s fraud case against Goldman Sachs. . . .

t is his few years at Citi — in particular the one year he spent at its then-$54 billion proprietary trading, hedge fund and private equity unit — that’s likely to raise the most eyebrows in the coming weeks as Lew faces a Senate confirmation hearing.

Especially his unit’s investments in a hedge fund that bet on the housing market to collapse — a reality suffered by millions of American homeowners.

In particular, the Citigroup fund run by Lew, Citi’s Alternative Investments, invested heavily in the hedge fund of John Paulson, “who made billions off the deterioration of the housing industry by making bearish bets on securities tied to home mortgages — particularly subprime home mortgages.” One of Paulson’s largest bets at the time involved Goldman Sachs, which the SEC has now charged with “defrauding investors by creating and selling exotic securities tied to subprime home mortgages in 2007 without disclosing that they were handpicked by a hedge fund [Paulson] that was betting on them to fail.”

Although these bets turned a profit for Citigroup as the housing market collapsed — a collapse that led to the foreclosures of millions of Americans’ homes — Lew’s unit “lost as much as billions of dollars in 2008 as its bets turned sour. In the first quarter of 2008 alone the unit lost $509 million; the company stopped publicly disclosing the unit’s individual numbers soon thereafter, but the part of the company that absorbed Alternative Investments lost $20.1 billion in 2008, according to the bank’s filings with the Securities and Exchange Commission.” As a result of that and other losses, Citigroup received $45 billion as part of the Wall Street bailout, and also used a crisis-created FDIC program to issue another $64.6 billion in taxpayer-backed debt. All of that led to these comments when Lew was chosen last year to replace Orszag as OMB Director:

Lew’s role at the fund is raising some eyebrows among good government groups.

“That sounds pretty nasty, doesn’t it?” said Gary Bass, executive director of OMB Watch, a group that monitors the budget office. “Any activity and any player that contributed to the economic calamity needs to be looked at.

“We already got enough players in this administration that certainly were key players in the economic malaise that we currently have,” Bass continued. “Why shouldn’t we have another one?” he said with a slight chuckle.

For his work at Citigroup, work that included betting on the housing collapse, Lew received a salary of $1.1 million. After Citigroup received its $45 billion taxpayer bailout, Lew — two weeks before joining the Obama administration — received another $900,000 from Citigroup as a bonus. This was revealed only in 2010; in 2009, when Lew first joined the administration as a State Department official, both he and the administration refused to say if he had received a post-bailout bonus from Citigroup (at the time, there was a huge political scandal over Wall Street executives receiving large bonuses despite needing taxpayer bailouts). There’s certainly nothing illegal about betting on a housing market collapse, but it’s quite symbolic that those who made millions of dollars from the crisis are now running government policy.

Lew (like so many key Obama officials) also participated in the orgy of Wall Street de-regulation that took place in the 1990s when he served as Clinton’s OMB head; after leaving Citigroup to join the Obama administration, he unsurprisingly said in response to questioning from Sen. Bernie Sanders that he does not believe deregulation contributed to the financial crisis. The New York Times today says that Lew “has built a reputation as a pragmatic liberal who believes Democrats must compromise with Republicans on long-term deficits in order to forestall draconian cuts to entitlement programs like Medicare and Social Security.” The Washington Post‘s Ezra Klein was a bit more blunt: Lew “has emerged as one of the members of the Obama administration Republicans prefer working with.” Whatever else one might want to say, Lew, a fairly standard-issue Democrat with less of a “centrist” reputation than Daley, is a perfect fit for this administration.

. On balance, he'll probably be a bit better than Geithner and certainly has a much better understanding of Washington than he did. But he's a Clintonite, so he's basically center-left, which means he would not take minor cuts to "entitlement" programs off the table. I can see why Obama likes him, they're from that same school of "pragmatist" with left-leaning inclinations. I'd have to go revisit that grand bargain and what he was willing to give up before I decide on how I feel about him.

 

[Dusty Bake Activate]

Do you feel this was an ethical decision by the President?

Don't really understand the question.

 

[No1]

If you can't tell, I've been following pieces on all the nominees, except people like Holder who are staying. The more I ride about Lew, it just seems like how you feel about him should come down to how you felt about Clinton's budget team.

Why Jack Lew Scares Republicans

When push came to shove in last minute negotiations between the White House and Republicans to avoid default on U.S. debt in late July 2011, Jack Lew finally lost his cool. “You don’t have to explain this to him, Gene! No! No! No!” Lew shouted at Obama’s staffer Gene Sperling, who was in the Senate office of a GOP staffer on the Hill and had Lew on speakerphone. The eruption was so surprising, and so emotional, the Republican staffer hung up on Lew, according to Bob Woodward’s account in The Price of Politics.

The outburst says something important about Jack Lew, whom President Barack Obama has tapped to replace Timothy Geithner as Secretary of the Treasury. Wonky, professional and grounded in decades of staff work in the obscure world of Washington budget politics, Lew’s reputation is decidedly undramatic. Even partisan Republicans have shown respect for Lew’s grasp of the nation’s finances. “No one was more prepared and more in tune with the numbers than Jack Lew,” House Majority leader Eric Cantor told Politico back in June 2011.

Democrats have turned to him for that experience, and the results have been effective, but rarely pyrotechnic. Bill Clinton made him OMB chief in the 1990s, and Hillary Clinton tapped him to master the State department’s unruly budget before Obama brought him over to the White House for his second stint in charge of OMB. Ultimately, Obama made him chief of staff last year.

But beneath the nerdy exterior, Lew is a passionate progressive on the issue of wealth disparity and programs for the poor. In the original Gramm-Rudman-Hollings “sequestration” talks in the mid-1980s, Lew negotiated the exemptions from automatic budget cuts for Medicaid and other low-income programs. In the 1990s, he again defended Medicaid from the budget axe as President Clinton tacked to the center. And his speakerphone outburst in July 2011 was in response to the Republican staffer’s suggestion that Medicaid cuts be added to the revivified “sequestration” process to avoid debt default.

This evident passion for what he sees as the moral dimensions in fiscal and economic policy combined with his expertise in the numbers makes him a formidable opponent as Washington heads into more tough negotiations over the budget and explains why Republicans are getting ready for an ugly confirmation fight. Alabama GOP Senator Jeff Sessions has written a draft statement opposing Lew’s appointment that he will release after Obama formally nominates him that says, “Jack Lew must never be secretary of the Treasury,” according to the Hill’s Alex Bolton.

But Lew is clearly who Obama wants. After the outburst in July 2011, Lew went to the Oval office to brief the president on the explosive confrontation he had just had with the GOP staffer, Rohit Kumar, over the phone. Reports Woodward:

Mr. President, I just absolutely blew the idea of Medicaid in the sequester out of the water, he said, and provided the details of his explosion, exactly what he had said.

It was the right thing to do, the president said.

Lew and Kumar soon resumed their conversation. Lew would not give on Medicaid, and Kumar finally dropped the idea.

 

[superunknown23]

Everyone was for deregulation in the 1990s when Greenspan was seen as a venerable guru.
He's no Geithner and Republicans hate him.
That's good enough for me