Wednesday, March 31, 2010

The Government to Private Sector Revolving Door IS...

...spinning quite nicely in D.C..

According to Gary Weiss, the inspector general's report on the SEC contains this:
The official who supervised the Allied probe got a special “thank you” from Allied. This person (his name is blanked out in the report) left the SEC a year later to work for the company, apparently as a registered lobbyist. The exact position he got is unclear in the report, but we do know that the SEC ethics office had no problem with that. Apparently the SEC’s conflict-of-interest rules can be summed up as a cheery “okie dokie!”

Ira Stoll writes that those attending a recent FDIC meeting included Allen Puwalski, who went from the FDIC to working for John Paulson; John Douglas, who went from the FDIC to a partner position at Davis Polk, where he’s “counseling Citigroup with respect to FDIC matters”; John C. Murphy, who went from the FDIC to a partner position at Cleary Gottlieb; and Kevin Stein, who went from the FDIC to FBR Capital Markets.

All this comes via Felix Salmon, who then notes:
If even Barney Frank’s staffers can’t resist the appeal of the revolving door, there’s really no hope that Frank or anybody else will be able to put an end to the practice.
Amazingly, while Salmon recognizes all the conflicts this revolving door activity causes, he fails to mention (realize?) that it is the power centers created by legislation that give these revolving door operators such a power center to influence. Eliminate the power centers, which are all up to no good, and most of these guys would be driving taxis.

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