Citigroup Inc., recovering from its $45 billion bailout in 2008, is in advanced talks to hire former White House Budget Director Peter Orszag, people with knowledge of the matter said.
Orszag, 41, may take a job in the New York-based firm’s investment-banking division, the people said, declining to be identified because the discussions are private. An announcement may come as early as today, one of the people said.
Orszag, an economist trained at Princeton University and the London School of Economics, helped shape U.S. economic stimulus during the financial crisis and overhaul the health- care system. The youngest member of President Barack Obama’s cabinet, he spent 18 months as White House budget director, stepping down in July.
He has since become a distinguished visiting fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations and a contributing columnist for the New York Times, writing about health care, budget policy and Social Security. His successor as budget director, Jacob Lew, worked at Citigroup from 2006 to 2009.
We take a budget director from Citigroup, we have to give one back. It's only fair. They're the ones that run the country, not the White House. Wouldn't want to inconvenience them.
The Fed accepted a total of $1.31 trillion in junk-rated collateral between Sept. 15, 2008 and May 12, 2009 through the Primary Dealer Credit Facility. TARP was nothing compared to this.
Anyone suggesting that the Fed's "emergency lending" facilities are just part of macro or monetary policy is kidding themselves. The Fed refused to accept junk-rated collateral until Sept. 15, 2008. When it became clear that Lehman was going off the rails, they started accepting junk-rated collateral-- even from Lehman Brothers itself!
That makes it very clear that the Fed was bailing out these firms in the midst of a crisis. They made a conscious decision to lower their lending standards in order to save big Wall Street firms with no strings attached.
From February 24, 2009 through May 12, 2009, Citigroup and Bank of America were the sole companies to borrow through the Fed's Primary Dealer Credit Facility, and they used it every single day. A total of 16 firms were eligible for the facility.
This Fed Audit data should shame all of the conventional-wisdom Democrats out there declaring TARP a success because of the recent CBO score. To put it mildly, these folks are totally missing the point. TARP was a "success" in large part because of the Fed's no-strings-attached efforts. And we now know that the Fed was willing to accept junk-- literally junk bonds-- as collateral for its no-strings-attached loans.
TARP and the stress tests only "worked" insofar as they convinced banks that the government would shoulder infinite future losses from the banking sector. We're now paying the price for that commitment in the form of massive foreclosure fraud, in which untold numbers of borrowers are being improperly kicked out of their homes in the name of bank profits.
And so it goes. This too will go down the memory hole. The banks got trillions in free money. In return they put up used toilet paper and mortgage cole slaw worth nothing.
No wonder Orszag is going there.
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