The Obamanation

[classicman]

The new WH Chief of Staff and Citigroup

Yesterday, the White House announced Daley’s departure — Daley will now co-chair Obama’s re-election campaign, which basically means raising huge amounts of money from his Wall Street friends — and unveiled his replacement as Chief of Staff: Jacob Lew. In 2010, Lew became head of the Office of Management and Budget when Peter Orszag left and then, a couple months later, accepted a multi-million dollar position as a high-level Citigroup official. Lew has spent many years in various government positions, but he has his own substantial ties to Citigroup. Here is what Lew was doing in 2008 at the time the financial crisis exploded, as detailed by an excellent Huffington Post report from last year:

[Lew] oversaw a Citigroup unit that profited off the housing collapse and financial crisis by investing in a hedge fund king who correctly predicted the eventual subprime meltdown and now finds himself involved in the center of the U.S. government’s fraud case against Goldman Sachs. . . .

[i]t is his few years at Citi — in particular the one year he spent at its then-$54 billion proprietary trading, hedge fund and private equity unit — that’s likely to raise the most eyebrows in the coming weeks as Lew faces a Senate confirmation hearing.

Especially his unit’s investments in a hedge fund that bet on the housing market to collapse — a reality suffered by millions of American homeowners.

In particular, the Citigroup fund run by Lew, Citi’s Alternative Investments, invested heavily in the hedge fund of John Paulson, “who made billions off the deterioration of the housing industry by making bearish bets on securities tied to home mortgages — particularly subprime home mortgages.” One of Paulson’s largest bets at the time involved Goldman Sachs, which the SEC has now charged with “defrauding investors by creating and selling exotic securities tied to subprime home mortgages in 2007 without disclosing that they were handpicked by a hedge fund [Paulson] that was betting on them to fail.”

Link

Is this the change you were looking for?

[Lamplighter]

And "you" is ??? ,,,,,,,,,,,, Maybe it's Eric Cantor

The Huffington Post
Luke Johnson
Posted: 1/9/12

Jack Lew Biography: Meet The New White House Chief Of Staff

As the White House's budget director, Lew has received
praise for working with Republicans, even from one of Obama's harshest critics.

"No one was more prepared and more in tune with the numbers than Jack Lew,"
said House Majority Leader Eric Cantor (R-Va.) in a 2010 Politico profile
during the height of the debt ceiling fight last summer.

"He was always very polite and respectful in his tone and
someone who I can tell is very committed to his principles.'"