March 18, 2010
http://detnews.com/article/20100318/METRO08/3180405Wall Street guru H. Rodgin Cohen has words for Detroit
CHARLIE LEDUFF
The Detroit News
New York -- H. Rodgin Cohen is perhaps the most important man you've never heard of in the world of international finance.
The senior chairman at the Sullivan & Cromwell law firm in New York City, Cohen -- known as Rodge -- was intimately involved in no less than 17 banking deals in the dark days of the financial collapse in 2008.
Now, a year-and-a-half year later, Cohen, 64, said
he believes that if more isn't done to shore up the ailing housing market and to create more jobs, the potential for civil unrest and political turmoil is very real.
"We have a history of being very law-abiding, being governed by the rule of law," he said. "But at some point, if people become desperate enough, laws won't make any difference."
In the end, he said, all the bailout money in the world will amount to very little unless we can create the type of good-paying manufacturing jobs that made Detroit the engine of the American economy."In the end it is about jobs, jobs, jobs," he said. "(It) goes back to Detroit. We did borrow too much and that obscured the real problems that we had in the economy because we could keep everybody afloat and everything afloat through excessive borrowing. We ignored what was really happening at the base. We were having our industrial and manufacturing and commercial base being reduced significantly."
And the need to re-create a solid American manufacturing sector is more the reason Washington is pushing green jobs than the need to save polar ice caps.
Why listen to a man who is a shill for Wall Street bankers who were dancing on a tightrope of doom one year only to make billions of dollars in bonuses the next, thanks to trillions in taxpayer bailouts?
"He is inside the inside," said Sen. Ted Kaufman, D-Del.
Among many deals, Cohen counseled the financial behemoth Lehman Brothers on their bankruptcy that sent the markets into a tailspin in 2008. He also represented AIG in its $85 billion bailout by Washington and advised Fannie Mae on its seizure by the federal government. Besides former Treasury Secretary Henry M. Paulson Jr., current Treasury Secretary Timothy F. Geithner and Federal Reserve Chairman Ben S. Bernanke, Cohen may have played the biggest role in the bailouts.
"Every time I looked up, it seemed like Rodge was in the room," Paulson recently told the New York Times.
In fact, Cohen's name was on the short list to be No. 2 at the Treasury, but his long tentacles were seen as a political liability.
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