Tuesday, December 8, 2009

Kashkari Grabs Pimco Payoff

Neel Kashkari, who ran the US government’s $700 billion TARP program during the Bush administration, has joined Pimco, the asset manager specialising in bonds.

While current Treasury Secretary Geithner was president of the Federal Reserve Bank of New York, it awarded Pimco contracts to help manage the response to the financial crisis. Pimco has helped oversee a program that guarantees on assets owned by Citigroup and Bank of America, and helped run a Fed program to buy $1.25 trillion in mortgage bonds, according to the Government Accountability Office.

Kashkari ran some of those programs from his Treasury post.

You can be sure there was no secret meeting between Kashkari and Pimco while he was at Treasury.That's not how it is done. But somehow while at Treasury, Kashkari developed a reputation with Pimco that he was "solid" and a "good guy". You don't get that kind of reputation by riding hard on Pimco.

And so the revolving door operator from Goldman to Treasury to Pimco has spun the door once more and money has come pouring out.

What else do we know about this revolving door man? Everywhere you look, it turns out he thinks government is a scam.

In a WaPo article Sunday, Kashkari said the $700 billion TARP figure "was a number out of the air," arrived at after Paulson told him Congress wouldn't approve $1 trillion. And, don't forget the famous tape where Kashkari admitted the then proposed executive compensation caps were a joke.

1 comment:

  1. Thanks Robert. That was a good article and revealed Kashkari as a thugish little guy without a moral compass. He had no problem stealing from the taxpayers to prop up bankrupt banks and would like to do it again, beacause thats the only place you can "really make a difference, for better or worse." Pimco deserves what they get from this ethically-challenged character.

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