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White House Chief of Staff and former Budget Director Jack Lew
Jack Lew, veteran of Citigroup and current White House Chief of Staff, will be our next Treasury Secretary:
President Obama will on Thursday afternoon announce his intent to nominate Jack Lew to serve as treasury secretary, the White House said.
The pick, widely reported on Wednesday, will come at a 1:30 p.m. ceremony in the East Room. The president and Lew, Obama’s current chief of staff, will be joined by Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner, who held the job throughout Obama’s first term.
Ahead of the announcement, an official shared the White House’s rundown of Lew’s career, arguing that he “will bring an impressive record of service in both the public and private sectors for over three decades and economic expertise to this important role, and his deep knowledge of domestic and international economic issues will enable him to take on the challenges facing our economy at home and abroad on day one.”
An impressive record in the private sector?
Though Lew is a longtime public servant who’s spent nearly 30 years in various positions throughout government, it 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.
So yet another administration official with his fingerprints all over the 2008 financial crisis. Geithner, Holder, and now Lew takes the big chair at Treasury.
It is becoming clearer by the day why no serious investigations and prosecutions of the Wall Street banks who instigated the financial crisis were done by the Obama administration – they would have to investigate themselves.
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Another banker in charge of the Treasury. What more could possibly go wrong?
Isn’t it abundantly clear that inside the beltway people are serving their constituents – corporate America… and doing so very well. The democracy thing is only a fig leaf over the criminality that takes place. Your reps won’t do anything about it because the criminals are their constituents and it’s into their upper echelons where the critters head after leaving congress.
Elections don’t break this because they are bought and paid for by the crooks on the outside and only gets their dupes inside. There must be some way out of here… said the joker to the thief…
X2
We need Batman.
Oh, hold it. He’s a member fo the 1% too.
Well then, we need a miracle.
Lew was on board when the 1983 commission cut Social Security benefits by 19% for those retiring now at the age of 66-67. (Raising the retirement age was a 13% cut.) He has been open to raising the Medicare eligibility age to 67.
They are positioning him to be the player for “deficit reduction” in his new position.
The die was cast with Obama’s cabinet appointments first term. He was free to appoint anyone he chose. People, you voted for this.
It can’t become more clear than it was then.
I’m overjoyed with this news. This is exactly the type of change we were looking for! Well done, Mr. President!
(do I need a snark tag?)
Democracy is dead. Time to move on.
Ack!
Representative Charlie Rangel had harsh words for the president about the recent nominees to his cabinet, calling the lack of diversity “embarrassing as hell.”
The 1983 SS “compromise” that Obama speaks of as if it were a good thing.
LINK re 19% benefit reduction
Yeaup. Did you see this?
Obama considering putting a cutter in place in the SS administration. SS to 68, chained cpi, progressive indexing….
Links HERE.
FDR’s grandson. Words fail me.
Good thing the lesser of two evils is working out. We could have had Romney. :)
I don’t think this guy has the economic smarts to do the job. Another hack, more cronyism. He is roughly equivalent to Erskine Bowles.
I wish more of them would step up. This Eisenhower Republican administration is not doing it for me. Now we have basketball instead of golf. No difference.
I hate to admit it, but the tip off was that Daschle encouraged Obama to run before Obama had to run against his own Senate record, as Daschle had to do and lost. And Daschle was a major 2008 campaign advisor as well.
We should have known then.
Things I glossed over then in my eagerness to keep a Republican out of the White House after 8 years of Dipshit have come back, one by one, to haunt me over and over.
Not Eisenhower. Reagan.