No wonder we bailout the financial industry with trillions.... http://www.nytimes.com/reuters/2009/04/03/washington/politics-us-summers-hedgefund.html Hedge Fund Paid Obama Adviser Summers $5.2 Million By REUTERS Published: April 3, 2009 Filed at 8:12 p.m. ET Skip to next paragraph Reuters WASHINGTON (Reuters) - Lawrence Summers, a top economic adviser to U.S. President Barack Obama, was paid about $5.2 million in compensation by hedge fund D.E. Shaw during the past year, according to financial disclosure forms released on Friday by the White House. Officials from D.E. Shaw were not immediately available for comment. Summers, a former U.S. treasury secretary, was a part-time managing director of the firm after stepping down as president of Harvard University. Summers was also paid hundreds of thousands of dollars in speaking fees from major Wall Street firms and financial institutions, including JP Morgan, Citigroup, Goldman Sachs and Lehman Brothers, the forms showed. Summers also received significant income from Harvard University and from investments. (Reporting by Roberta Rampton; Editing by John O'Callaghan)
The bailout started under the democratic congress, the same one that is currently in power. I can pull many threads in these forums that point out Bush is a lame duck president. Nothing to see here.
You know it is amazing how you would attempt to distort the facts when they don't suit you. TARP was created by Bush and the Treasury. Paulson and the White House created the ridiculous three page proposal for TARP. Bush pushed TARP through Congress. All of that happened before Obama became President. Insinuating some link between TARP, Obama, and his advisors is ridiculous.
You should check out how much Summers got from Russia dirty money in the process of bankrupting that country. (ok, it's his friend, but I suspect there was undertable favor the other way around.)
hedge funds suffered under 20% losses in 08. s&p went down 38% or something. hedge funds didn't need bail outs.
Summers was an employee at DE SHAW and thus he got compensated as such. DE SHAW wasn't on the receiving end of any bailout money. They are the smartest guys on the block. I couldn't even get past round two of their interview system a few years back.
What is amazing is your complete lack of reading comprehension skills. I did not even remotely hint at anything about Obama and his administration.
What is amazing is how many posters here want to blame everything on former President Bush while omitting the role of President Pelosi, Emperor Reid, Czar Dodd and Czarina Frank. Bush, while culpable, couldn't "push" anything through a Democratic Congress without their overwhelming support and the blessing of Obama. Get real -- both parties and the greedy executives they suppported got us into this mess.
This is true, but you should get real that it is conservative economics with its deregulation craziness which has about 100% support in the GOP,while only minority support in the Dems, that has led us to this fix. I am fearful, like Krugman and others, that Obama is too enamored with the same old Wall Street guys who created this mess. Geithner is just about the only one who hasn't been a recent GS employee (a slight exaggeration) and he was chair of the NTY Fed and was heavily involved in creating the failed financial regime, too.
We are nearly in agreement with this. The false conservatives of the Bush Administration and Republican Party collaborated with the Democrat Party to push an agenda of supporting loan policies that lined the pockets of Wall Streeters while entrapping the poor with something-for-nothing-looking loans that were unrealistic and bound to fail.
This thread is about Larry Summers, TARP, and Obama but I'm the one with the comprehension problem. Bush, Paulson, and Bernanke created TARP. They started it and they brought it to Congress, it didn't happen the other way around. Go read or something.
1. Why would *anyone* be surprised, before or after Obama was elected and Summers was appointed, that this would be the case? If he wasn't getting that kind of cake from the financial industry, it would be because he was incompetent. 2. Separately, I do not like Summers, and I did not like his appointment. Did not show himself to be a good "plays with others" with prez of Harvard. Brilliant? Maybe -- definitely not for me to judge.
I think Pelosi and Reid are a couple of idiots but Bush has always played politics in getting things passed through Congress from Iraq, to the Patriot Act, to war funding, surveillance, and TARP. He basically told Congress, pass this or there'll be a major panic. One of the reasons Bush gets so much blame is because of the underhanded way he's governed.
Translated this means that they are all politicians and will cater to those that line their pockets. There is little substantive difference. Thanks for finally coming around.
Bingo. He worked in the financial sector and got paid by the financial sector. What did people expect, exactly? Two questions: 1. What did the NY Fed have to do with credit default swaps and bad mortgages? 2. Who exactly would you want in charge of finance? People who don't anything about finance? What exactly did people like Summers contribute to the problem - unless you believe everyone involved in finance somehow was at fault?
Again, I can hardly believe this type of "argument." One day Bush is "W," the consummate idiot, and the next day he is the brilliant, manipulative master of evil Lex Luther. Which is it? Actually it's neither. More than likely -- since we are playing the pure speculation game -- is that Pelosi and Reid (under advisement of Democratic strategists) came to Bush and told him about the crisis so he could look powerful even as a lame duck while also taking the blame they knew would come.
