Saturday, November 16, 2013

Geithner Goes to the Trough

I've written this piece before, when Allegheny County Executive Dan Onorato took a job as a lobbyist with the health insurance firm, Highmark. But Onorato is a small time player compared to former Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner.

It was quietly announced yesterday that Geithner will become President of Warburg-Pincus, the country's fifth largest private equity firm—similar to Bain Capital, the ninth largest private equity firm, formerly headed by Mitt Romney. These are the vulture capitalists that buy up troubled companies and either close them and sell off their assets, or attempt to revive them by seeking loans and imposing austerity measures, then selling them at a profit. Either way, layoffs are an almost certain result. Economist Robert Reich explains how private equity firms work.


Geithner takes his place behind previous Treasury Secretaries like Robert Rubin and John Snow, who, after accepting several years of poverty-level wages in “public service,” walked through the revolving door between business and government to cash in for all the favors they had done for Wall Street while they were in office.

As Treasury Secretary, Geithner supervised the Troubled Asset Relief Fund, aka, the bank bailout, which ensured that banks and investment firms made huge profits following the 2008 recession, even as the rest of the country lost money. Here's future Senator Elizabeth Warren in 2009 quizzing him about where the money went.


Geithner is known for institutionalizing the idea that some banks are too big to fail, and in fact, the financial sector is more concentrated now than it was before the recession. He is also credited with ensuring that there would be no meaningful reregulation of the financial sector—for example, no separation between commercial and investment banking, and no meaningful changes in the trading of derivatives—thereby making it likely that we will have another recession before long.

Geithner had previously stated that he was “extremely unlikely” to take a job in the private finance industry. Maybe he didn't realize how grateful the 1% would be for the services he had rendered.

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