tagged w/ Citi Group
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Former Citi Group Investment Banker Is Obama's New Chief of Staff
It has been less than a month since Jacob (Jack) Lew kindled the National Menorah in front of the White House. When he did so, Lew was director of the White House Office of Management and Budget (a position he had also held under the Clinton administration). Now, President Barack Obama is appointing Lew as White House’s new Chief of Staff.
Seeing as how sentiment against the unmitigated profits of Wall Street reached fever pitch over the last year, one would think President Obama would be wise to consider resumes from other corridors of power to choose from when deciding upon a new chief of staff. And maybe he did!
In the end, however, he decided upon Jacob Lew. Here are some fun facts about Jacob Lew:
•Prior to his appointment as a deputy secretary at the Department of State, Mr. Lew was Chief Operating Officer of CitiGroup’s Alternative Investments group.
•Do you know what Alternative Investments are? They’re things like hedge funds, who buy things like credit default swaps! Credit default swaps are essentially the ability to buy insurance on someone else’s house in one hand as you hold anything else—the adjustable-rate mortgage you know they can’t pay off, or the capacity to sell that mortgage and therefore generate more mortgages like it, or a gasoline can—in the other hand. This is what Jacob Lew invested in!
•In 2008 and the beginning of 2009, Mr. Lew took in $1.1M from CitiGroup.
•This included a $900,000 bonus.
•Mr. Lew doesn’t think financial deregulation was one of the problems adding up to the financial crisis that has persisted since 2008.Former Citi Group Investment Banker Is Obama's New Chief of Staff
It has been... more
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As an American journalist in Japan, Jake Adelstein uncovered a world unknown to many of the Japanese public, let alone to foreigners: the world of organized crime. For 12 years, he investigated for Japan's largest newspaper, the Yomiuri Shinbun.
In his final story, Adelstein went toe-to-toe with one of the country's most notorious crime bosses, a discovery that led to death threats for him and his family — death threats that have yet to be lifted. His new memoir about his experiences is called Tokyo Vice: An American Reporter on the Police Beat in Japan.
After leaving the paper in 2005, Adelstein was chief investigator for a U.S. State Department-sponsored study of human trafficking in Japan. Today he is considered one of the foremost experts on organized crime in Japan, and works as a writer and consultant in Japan and the United States.
Adelstein is also the public relations director for the Washington, D.C.-based Polaris Project Japan, which combats human trafficking and the exploitation of women and children in the sex trade. He joins Terry Gross to talk about that work, his book and the organized-crime landscape in Japan.
http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=120237244As an American journalist in Japan, Jake Adelstein uncovered a world unknown to many... more
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Commissions are often created to defer tough decisions; to forge a consensus around a hard solution to a genuine problem; and, rarely, actually to delve into underlying facts. The Angelides commission (http://www.nytimes.com/2009/07/16/business/16inquiry.html?_r=1), officially chartered by Congress this summer as the Financial Crisis Inquiry Commission, has the chance to be that third kind of commission, gathering the missing empirical data on fundamental questions that can guide future decision-making.
We already know an awful lot more about what happened last year than we did in 1932, when the legendary Pecora commission(http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pecora_Commission) was created to investigate the Wall Street crash. We know the fundamental violations of sound banking practice and regulatory failures that brought us to the precipice. Yet there are still critical areas that would benefit from the commission's detailed analysis: four structural issues that have not yet received adequate attention and one particular transaction that is still highly ambiguous.Commissions are often created to defer tough decisions; to forge a consensus around a... more
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The Dow surged more than 350 points Tuesday -- its best day in an otherwise dismal 2009 -- as Wall Street cheered after embattled Citigroup said it was profitable during the first two months of the year.
Read and Discuss...The Dow surged more than 350 points Tuesday -- its best day in an otherwise dismal... more
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