Topping the list is former-Lazard Freres honcho Felix Rohatyn (82), who Murray Rothbard once called the "No. 1 Corporate State businessman" and id'd as a member in good standing of "Wall Street Left".
Rohatyn is often credited with "saving" New York City in 1975 from bankruptcy, but he was really the Tim Geithner/Hank Paulson/Lloyd Blankfein of his day. What he really did was save Wall Street, which held billions of dollars of low-interest New York City bonds. He set up the Municipal Assistance Corporation and then fired police, public health, fire, sanitation, and other city employees and redirected the revenues to pay the interest on the debt held by Wall Street.
More recently, this financial genius, obviously clueless to the disaster around him, on August 22, 2006, joined Lehman Brothers as chairman of its international advisory committee and as a senior adviser to its chairman, Richard S. Fuld, Jr.
In his autobiography, The Age of Turbulence, Alan Greenspan recounted that Rohatyn, along with
Barbara threw me a fiftieth-birthday party at her house. The guests were the people I’d come to think of as my New York friends: Henry and Nancy Kissinger, Oscar and Annette de laRenta, Felix and Liz Rohatyn, Brooke Astor (I knew her as a kid of seventy-five), Joe and Estee Lauder, Henry and Louise Grunwald, “Punch” and Carol Sulzberger, and David Rockefeller. I’m still friends with many of these people today more than thirty years later. (pp. 80–81)Bottom line: With Rohatyn the elder statesman, the Rockefeller influence is well embedded in the incoming Cuomo administration. Others Cuomo named include:
Short-seller Jim Chanos, president of Kynikos Associates; state Business Council President Ken Adams, former Avis chief executive and ex-state Republican chairman Pat Barrett, New York State AFL-CIO President Denis Hughes, American Express Chairman Kenneth Chenault, Highbridge Capital Management co-founder Glenn Dubin and the man who was instrumental in taking down Eliot Spitzer, Ken Langone, chairman of Invemed Associates.And
Mario Baeza, founder of Baeza Group; Buffalo Mayor Byron Brown; Derrick Cephas, president of Amalgamated Bank; former U.S. Labor Secretary Alexis Herman; Marc Morial, president of the National Urban League; Rossana Rosado, chief executive of El Diario; Peter Solomon, former New York City deputy mayor of economic policy and development; Martin Sosnoff, chairman of Atalanta Sosnoff; Bob Wilmers, chief executive of M&T Bank; Deborah Wright, president of Carver Bancorp; and Frank Zarb, former chairman of the NASDAQ stock exchange.
The only decent thing anybody in this group has ever done, outside of Langone destroying Spitzer's political career, was done by Sosnoff,
when he commissioned Warhol to come up with a design for his book on investing. Warhol came up with this edgy dollar sign. The whole entire crew and this is the only thing they could come up with for all their careers combined.
Chanos? Wtf? The man spotted the Enron fraud and he can't sniff this one out?
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