Senate Committee OKs Lew Treasury Nomination
Source: MarketWatch
WASHINGTON (MarketWatch) -- The Senate Finance Committee on Tuesday approved the nomination of former White House chief of staff Jack Lew to be the next Treasury secretary, sending the nomination to the Senate floor for a vote.
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Lew is a veteran of Washington budget battles and did a stint at Citigroup. Nineteen senators voted to approve him, while five -- all Republicans -- voted against Lew.
Read more: http://www.marketwatch.com/story/senate-committee-oks-lew-treasury-nomination-2013-02-26-10914236?link=MW_home_latest_news
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Angry Dragon
(36,693 posts)
Autumn
(45,107 posts)offered or gave a bonus to if he got a job in the government? It sounds just about par for the course. Fuckers
Yep that's the one
http://www.businessinsider.com/citis-government-job-bonus-for-jack-lew-2013-2#ixzz2LvKLkFkb
geek tragedy
(68,868 posts)left Citigroup to work for a competitor, but could keep it if he left Citigroup if he went to work for the government.
Hardly a molehill, much less a mountain.
Autumn
(45,107 posts)
geek tragedy
(68,868 posts)How does that affect his qualifications or ability to do the job?
Autumn
(45,107 posts)He get's to keep his bonus for securing a high position in the government.
geek tragedy
(68,868 posts)Had he just stayed at Citigroup, he would have received it.
It was a reward for not working for a competitor of Citigroup.
naaman fletcher
(7,362 posts)If he went to ANY other job, not just a competitor, he would not have gotten a bonus. It is a reward for getting a government job.
geek tragedy
(68,868 posts)First, it's useful to clarify: Jack Lew didn't get a "bonus" for leaving Citigroup to go to the public sector. There was no extra money involved. Instead, by taking a high-ranking government job, Lew simply got to keep the bonus money he had already been paid. Several other circumstances would have allowed him to keep that money even if he left Citigroup. They included "a significant reduction in your title/function or responsibilities" and "a relocation of your principal place of employment to a location that is not within a commutable distance in the New York City area." All that was notable about Lew's contract is that it put acceptance of "a full-time high level position with the United States government or regulatory body" on the list of circumstances under which it was okay for him to leave without forfeiting his bonus.
So, why did it do that? After reading Jonathan Weil's column and looking at the first three pages of Lew's employment agreement, the most likely chain of events I can think of is this: Lew was a longtime D.C. budget wonk who, in 2006, was taking a break from the public sector and wanted to make a lot of money for a few years before going back to Washington. Lew's old mentor Robert Rubin got him a job at Citigroup that paid $300,000 per year, plus a guaranteed bonus of at least $400,000 that would be prepaid for his first year on the job.
Most high-level Wall Street jobs come with pretty severe restrictions on what happens to your deferred compensation if you decide to leave. And since Lew's money was being paid up front, the bank had a vested interest in making sure he stuck around for the entirety of 2006 and didn't go work at Goldman Sachs or a hedge fund down the street.
But Lew, who spent the vast majority of his career in government, likely knew he was never going to stay at Citigroup forever — he was only using the bank as a short-term, high-paying stopover. So it behooved him to make sure that he wasn't subject to the same rules as other Citigroup employees. If the opportunity to move back to the public sector presented itself — say, if Ben Bernanke dropped dead and Lew was offered the Fed chairmanship — he wanted to be able to take the job without losing all of his Citigroup bonus money. So it may be that Lew — who was a major hire for Citigroup and thus had negotiating leverage — was just looking out for himself, and that the "high level position with the United States government" contract clause was his idea, not Citigroup's.
naaman fletcher
(7,362 posts)
Arkana
(24,347 posts)Now we can experience the Benghazi & Bailey Bros. Circus all over again in the Senate, made even more absurd by the fact that Jack Lew has nothing to do with Benghazi. You know those fucks will find a way.
OKNancy
(41,832 posts)I think people should know that he is the reason there is no mention of cuts to Medicare or SS in the sequester deal.
I can see the left going after Brennan, but Lew is the most liberal of all Obama's cabinet. Like what was said in the healthcare debate... don't throw stones at the good because you don't have the perfect.
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http://www.salon.com/2013/01/17/hey_liberals_lay_off_jack_lew/
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So just to restate the points, Jack Lew has spent essentially his entire career in public life — on the Hill, in the executive branch, and with universities — though he did spend about 18 months with Citigroup, which I suspect he’ll never live down. He has succeeded in every role he has taken on. He is not spectacular — from my fairly close observations, as they used to say in my high school, he brings his lunch and does an all-day job. He believes deeply in the value of the public sector, and as deeply in the importance of a high-quality public sector, in the importance of getting it right.
He hasn’t spent a lifetime in the financial private sector — I’m personally delighted President Obama did not go that way — but there is no one who knows and understands the complexities of our public finance better than Jack Lew. People always dismiss that as a green eye shade, low order kind of quality. Understanding budgets and public finance is for people who wear breast pocket pen protectors, not for the higher order idea men and women.
But this is a very good nomination, and the odds are high that Jack Lew will be a very good Treasury Secretary. Much more importantly, Jack Lew is the kind of person we all would like to see in public life.
and
In fact, Lew has a well-deserved reputation for homing in on the values that lurk behind the numbers. Progressives in and out of government in the late 1990s recall him as one of the key defenders of Medicare and Medicaid from the designs of axe-wielding Republicans. “There was no bigger supporter,” one liberal policy maven told me. “He saved Medicaid.” More recently, as a top Obama emissary to the deficit negotiations of the last few years, he’s been dogged in his insistence that Democrats won’t entertain the tiniest pinprick to these programs unless Republicans put revenue on the table.
That, I’d guess, is half the reason Republicans have reservations about him (at least to the extent their reservations are sincere rather than a crass play for leverage). The other half is that Lew is just plain effective. During Obama’s first confrontation with the House GOP in early 2011, John Boehner’s troops were bent on lopping $100 billion off Obama’s budget request for that year, an eye-popping sum to squeeze out of a weak economy. Obama, with Lew as his chief negotiator, eventually compromised at $78 billion, which looked at first like a massive concession, but was a pretty favorable outcome once you read the fine print. As it happened, Lew was able to produce a “headline” number that was large and pleasing to the GOP but ultimately rather meaningless: He’d conjured up cuts to piles of money that weren’t going to be spent anyway, and handed them over to Republicans wrapped in pretty little bows. “Boehner and his guys got snookered by Rob Nabors and Jack Lew,” a senior White House official told me while I was writing a book on the subject. “We protected what we wanted to protect.”
Perhaps not surprisingly, GOP leaders have repeatedly petitioned the White House to send someone other than Lew to join them at the bargaining table. Which points to at least one reason to love his nomination: It’s an instance of Obama emphatically not allowing Republicans to choose their negotiating partner, a rule he hasn’t always observed.
http://www.newrepublic.com/blog/plank/111780/when-it-comes-worldview-jack-lew-obama-in-coke-bottle-glasses
