Monday, 14 January 2013

Matt Taibbi & Bill Black: Obama's New Treasury Secretary a 'Failure of Epic Proportions'

Taibbi and Black dissect the career of Jack Lew, who has been a cheerleader for the financial industry at the public's heavy expense.
January 11, 2013 |
Photo Credit: AFP
 
JUAN GONZÁLEZ: President Obama is facing criticism for nominating another former Wall Street executive to become treasury secretary. On Thursday, Obama tapped his own chief of staff, Jack Lew, to replace Timothy Geithner. Lew was an executive at Citigroup from 2006 to 2008 at the time of the financial crisis. He served as chief operating officer of Citigroup’s Alternative Investments unit, a group that bet on the housing market to collapse.

Lew has also long pushed for the deregulation of Wall Street. From 1998 to January 2001, he headed the Office of Management and Budget under President Clinton. During that time, Clinton signed into law two key laws to deregulate Wall Street: the Financial Services Modernization Act of 1999 and the Commodity Futures Modernization Act of 2000.

On Thursday, independent Senator Bernie Sanders of Vermont criticized Lew’s nomination, saying, quote, "We don’t need a treasury secretary who thinks that Wall Street deregulation was not responsible for the financial crisis."

WILLIAM BLACK: Well, on financial matters, Jack Lew has been a failure of pretty epic proportions, and he gets promoted precisely because he is willing to be a failure and is so useful to Wall Street interests


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