(NO. Just like they didn't ask what she thought of taking the help of sub-prime Banker Deval Patrick - promoted by Rob "EaBo Clipper" Eno)
Jack Lew is Barack Obama's designate for the Secretary of the Treasury. In this role, Mr. Lew will oversee the regulation of the financial system. The Office of the Comptroller of the Treasury, which regulates national banks, is part of the Treasury Department. The Secretary of the Treasury serves as the chairman of the Financial Stability Oversight Commission, a creation of the Dodd-Frank Act.
How Ms. Warren votes on Mr. Lew confirmation should be of great interest to the Boston media.
In the 2012 campaign, Ms. Warren claimed that she was going to go to Washington to stand up to Wall Street financial institutions. In particular, she singled out Citigroup as one of the worst offenders. On April 9, 2009, Ms. Warren even called for top executives of Citigroup to be fired. http://www.guardian.co.uk/busi...
So now that Barack Obama has nominated a top banker from Citigroup as Treasury Secretary. Will Ms. Warren vote to hire such an individual? If Citigroup executives are not qualified to run a billion dollar bank, what makes Ms. Warren think that such an individual would be qualified to run a $16 trillion government (based on debt outstanding)?
Moreover, Mr. Lew was at the core of the problems at Citigroup so says MIT Professor Simon Johnson to the Washington Post: http://articles.washingtonpost...
In early 2008, [Lew] became a top executive in the Citigroup unit that housed many of the bank's riskiest operations, including its hedge funds and private equity investments. Massive losses in that unit helped drive Citigroup into the arms of the federal government, which bailed out the bank with $45 billion in taxpayer money that year.
The group had been under pressure to compete with similar units at other big Wall Street firms and, some analysts say, took on too many risks as it played catch-up.
"The mismanagement of risk was comprehensive at that organization," said Simon Johnson, an economist at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.
That's not all. Mr. Lew, it turns out has investments in funds registered in the Cayman Islands, exactly what the Democrats pilloried Mr. Romney for. This morning, the Washington Post Opinion page ran a column titled "Obama's hypocrisy on Jack Lew". http://www.washingtonpost.com/... The Post reports:
last year, Barack Obama showed Mitt Romney warbling "America the Beautiful" while pictures of a sandy beach appeared and the ad declared: "He had millions in a Swiss bank account . . . tax havens like Bermuda ... and the Cayman Islands." It concluded: "Mitt Romney's not the solution. He's the problem."
Well, apparently someone else is part of the "problem": Obama's nominee for Treasury secretary, Jack Lew.
It turns out Lew had $56,000 invested in a Citigroup venture capital fund based in . . . wait for it . . . the Cayman Islands. Sen. Chuck Grassley (R-Iowa), a member of the Finance Committee before which Lew will soon appear, declared, "The irony is thick," pointing out that "President Obama has been almost obsessively critical of offshore investments."
So will the crusading Elizabeth Warren vote to put a Citigroup banker in charge of America's financial system? You would think that someone in the Boston media would see a story angle here. Apparently not. The Globe hasn't run a story about Mr. Lew since his nomination and has never mentioned his work at Citigroup or investments in the Cayman Islands. Nor has the Herald. Perhaps Sharman Sacchetti might ask Ms. Warren what she thinks of Jack Lew. As for the rest of the Boston media, you can hear the sounds of crickets chirping.
The Lew hearings start tomorrow. |
