[Peace-discuss] Obama's people, 2

[C. G. Estabrook]

	Wall Street To Washington: "I Want My Campaign Contributions Back"
	By Moe Tkacik - March 25, 2009, 1:33PM

Yes, that was an actual sentence spoken -- or more specifically "groused" -- by 
an anonymous Wall Street executive concerned for his "personal safety," though 
not enough to be dissuaded from attending or talking to a reporter at 
yesterday's Wall Street Journal 'Future Of Finance' Conference, where the future 
sounded like it had gone back in time and purchased a hundred billion dollars 
worth of extra credit protection, which is to say suspiciously like Finance Past.

It looks like Wall Street, no doubt emboldened by the recent 20% runup in the 
S&P 500, the fourteen bucks in matching leverage the government is offering them 
for every dollar they invest in toxic/"legacy" assets and the prospect of 
better-than-awful numbers at Citigroup and Credit Suisse, got its hubris back 
along with its proverbial groove. In the six months since it nearly triggered 
global financial Armageddon, the investment banking community has seemed, if not 
quite chastened, at least somewhat subdued amidst the nation's ever-heightening 
awareness that their industry engineered the ever-intensifying economic morass. 
But not anymore!

This morning the New York Times ran as an op-ed the resignation letter of one 
Jake DeSantis, a securities trader and executive vice president at AIG's 
infamous financial products division and recipient of one of those million 
dollar bonuses ($742,006.40 after taxes.) That's right: he's keeping it. And 
don't ask him if he feels guilty about it because he will tell you: NO.

     "I have decided to donate 100 percent of the effective after-tax proceeds 
of my retention payment directly to organizations that are helping people who 
are suffering from the global downturn. This is not a tax-deduction gimmick; I 
simply believe that I at least deserve to dictate how my earnings are spent, and 
do not want to see them disappear back into the obscurity of A.I.G.'s or the 
federal government's budget."

In other words, Jake DeSantis is proud of his work and all his colleagues who 
earned their bonuses fair and square despite a "dysfunctional environment" and 
incessant calls from head hunters -- which is why he absolutely cannot run the 
risk that his bonus might just line the pocket of another Jake DeSantis.

The same sort of nonsensical non-logic runs throughout the profile of Tim 
Geithner in this week's New York magazine, in which banker after banker 
anonymously pillories the Obama economic team for abuses ranging from not 
answering the phone to requesting confidence and patience to changing course 
occasionally to "smoking crack." Of Geithner himself, whose very nomination for 
the post Obama considered to be a rather robust offer of an olive branch to the 
Street, a "name-brand Democratic banker" explains: "They don't get it. Geithner 
was a $500,000-a-year guy. He was the regulator. People knew him, liked him 
fine, but he was never a member of the club."

A Geithner ally in Washington elaborates:

     A lot of the pushback he's getting from Wall Street is about their lack of 
self-awareness about how the world has changed...They feel marginalized and 
put-upon by the administration's rhetoric about the greedy bankers...They see 
their taxes going up and their compensation going down. And what they don't do 
is go to the New York Times and say, 'My feelings are hurt. I don't like what 
the new president is saying about our character and our competence.' What they 
say is, 'These guys are incompetent, we need a real policy, the Treasury 
secretary has got an unsteady hand--he's not up to the job.' They're thinking 
one thing and saying something quite different."

Mercifully for the president, for now, many are preoccupied thinking about how 
to make serious cash again. As Goldman Sachs president Gary Cohn told 
yesterday's assembled at that Future of Finance: "Wall Street is not over. Wall 
Street is alive and well."

In other words, Wall Street to Washington: We're back.

http://tpmmuckraker.talkingpointsmemo.com/2009/03/wall_street_to_washington_i_want_my_campaign_contr.php