NYT: Geithner's Clubby Relationship with Wall Street's Power Elite

NYT's Jo Becker and Gretchen Morgenson fill in a lot of detail in the obvious close, relationship Geithner has with Wall Street's power elite (as especially with Goldman Sachs employees and former Goldman Sachs employees):

He proposed asking Congress to give the president broad power to guarantee all the debt in the banking system, according to two participants, including Michele Davis, then an assistant Treasury secretary....“People thought, ‘Wow, that’s kind of out there,’ ” said John C. Dugan, the comptroller of the currency, who heard about the idea afterward
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[As New York Fed president] He was the federal regulator most willing to “push the envelope,” said H. Rodgin Cohen, a prominent Wall Street lawyer who spoke frequently with Mr. Geithner.

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An examination of Mr. Geithner’s five years as president of the New York Fed...
shows that he forged unusually close relationships with executives of Wall Street’s giant financial institutions.

His actions, as a regulator and later a bailout king, often aligned with the industry’s interests and desires, according to interviews with financiers, regulators and analysts and a review of Federal Reserve records.

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His calendars from 2007 and 2008 show that those interactions were a mix of the professional and the private.

He ate lunch with senior executives from Citigroup, Goldman Sachs and Morgan Stanley at the Four Seasons restaurant or in their corporate dining rooms. He attended casual dinners at the homes of executives like Jamie Dimon, a member of the New York Fed board and the chief of JPMorgan Chase.

Mr. Geithner was particularly close to executives of Citigroup, the largest bank under his supervision. Robert E. Rubin, a senior Citi executive and a former Treasury secretary [and former Goldman CEO], was Mr. Geithner’s mentor from his years in the Clinton administration, and the two kept in close touch in New York...

While the New York Fed’s rules do not prevent its president from holding such one-on-one meetings, that was not the general practice of Mr. Geithner’s recent predecessors, said Ernest T. Patrikis, a former general counsel and chief operating officer at the New York Fed.

“Typically, there would be senior staff there to protect against disputes in the future as to the nature of the conversations,” he said.

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In fashioning the bailout, his drive to use taxpayer money to backstop faltering firms overrode concerns that such a strategy would encourage more risk-taking in the future. In one bailout instance, Mr. Geithner fought a proposal to levy fees on banks that would help protect taxpayers against losses.

The bailout has left the Fed holding a vast portfolio of troubled securities. To manage them, Mr. Geithner gave three no-bid contracts to BlackRock, an asset-management firm with deep ties to the New York Fed.

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Mr. Geithner played a pivotal role in the next bailout, which was even bigger — that of the American International Group, the insurance giant whose derivatives business had brought it to the brink of collapse in September. He also went to bat for Goldman Sachs, one of the insurer’s biggest trading partners...

A.I.G.’s chief executive at the time,Robert B. Willumstad, said he had hired bankers at JPMorgan to help it raise capital. Goldman Sachs had jockeyed for the job as well, but because the investment bank was one of A.I.G.’s biggest trading partners, Mr. Willumstad rejected the idea. The potential conflicts of interest, he believed, were too great.

Nevertheless, on Monday, Sept. 15, Mr. Geithner pushed A.I.G. to bring Goldman onto its team to raise capital, Mr. Willumstad said.

Mr. Geithner and Mr. Corrigan, a Goldman managing director, were close, speaking frequently and sometimes lunching together at Goldman headquarters. On that day, the company’s chief executive, Lloyd C. Blankfein, was at the New York Fed.

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Mr. Geithner has also faced scrutiny over how well taxpayers were served by his handling of another aspect of the bailout: three no-bid contracts the New York Fed awarded to BlackRock, a money management firm, to oversee troubled assets acquired by the bank.

BlackRock was well known to the Fed. Mr. Geithner socialized with Ralph L. Schlosstein, who founded the company and remains a large shareholder, and has dined at his Manhattan home

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According to a recent report by the inspector general monitoring the bailout, Neil M. Barofsky, Mr. Geithner’s plan to underwrite investors willing to buy the risky mortgage-backed securities still weighing down banks’ books is a boon for private equity and hedge funds but exposes taxpayers to “potential unfairness” by shifting the burden to them.