SALON

Tuesday, Nov 13, 2012 4:48 PM UTC

Ugh, not Erskine Bowles for Treasury

He's on a short list to replace Timothy Geithner, but who really thinks he can bring accountability to Wall Street?

By , The American Prospect

Topics: Wall Street, Timothy Geithner, The American Prospect, Erskine Bowles, Jack Lew

Ugh, not Erskine Bowles for TreasuryErskine Bowles (Credit: New America Foundation/Flickr)
This article originally appeared on The American Prospect.

The American Prospect By this point, it’s clear that former Clinton administration official and twice-failed North Carolina Senate candidate Erksine Bowles is on the short list to replace Tim Geithner as Treasury Secretary. For reasons outlined by Paul Krugman, and our own Robert Kuttner, Bowles would be a terrible choice for Treasury: He’s a deficit scold more concerned with lowering taxes than reducing unemployment and providing a strong base for economic growth.

But he has his advocates, among them William Cohan, a former investment banker and investigative journalist. Cohan sees the deficit as the chief problem facing the United States, and thinks Bowles is the only candidate for Treasury who can craft a bipartisan deal to get our “fiscal house in order” and bring some accountability to Wall Street.

Wait, what?

Yes, Cohan sees Bowles as a more progressive alternative to the other name on the short list, White House Chief of Staff Jack Lew. Here’s what he has to say:

For Treasury secretary, the best choice is Erskine Bowles, who has distinguished himself as co-chairman of the National Commission on Fiscal Responsibility and Reform. […] He understands Wall Street – he founded a small eponymous investment bank and a private-equity firm, Carousel Capital, and was a partner at private-equity giant Forstmann Little & Co. – and did a fine job serving as president of the sprawling University of North Carolina system.

More important, he has spent the past year shaping his commission’s report – despite Obama’s having ignored it – into legislation that Congress can take up immediately to try to resolve the budget deficit and the looming fiscal cliff, the more than $600 billion in tax increases and spending cuts scheduled for next year. He has a proven record of bipartisanship, working well with Alan Simpson and the other Republicans on the commission. Appointing Bowles to Treasury would show that Obama is serious about getting the country’s fiscal house in order and finding a more productive relationship with Wall Street.

This doesn’t make any sense. The most likely outcome of appointing a former investment banker to the Treasury is that you have an administration official who is sympathetic to the concerns of investment bankers. And this is especially true when the candidate is a well-known conservative Democrat who is hostile to progressive policies and interests. Cohan seems to see Bowles as the Nixon who can go to China, but the truth of the matter—besides the fact that the analogy doesn’t quite fit—is that if you want a Treasury secretary who will bring accountability to Wall Street, you don’t pick someone whose career is tied to it.

Continue Reading Close
Read more of The American Prospect at http://www.prospect.org.

More Jamelle Bouie.

Next Article

Related Stories

Featured Slide Shows

What To Read Awards: Top 10 Books of 2012 slide show

close X
  • Share on Twitter
  • Share on Facebook
  • Thumbnails
  • Fullscreen
  • 1 of 10
  • 10. "The Guardians" by Sarah Manguso: "Though Sarah Manguso’s 'The Guardians' is specifically about losing a dear friend to suicide, she pries open her intelligent heart to describe our strange, sad modern lives. I think about the small resonating moments of Manguso’s narrative every day." -- M. Rebekah Otto, The Rumpus

  • 9. "Beautiful Ruins" by Jess Walter: "'Beautiful Ruins' leads my list because it's set on the coast of Italy in 1962 and Richard Burton makes an entirely convincing cameo appearance. What more could you want?" -- Maureen Corrigan, NPR's "Fresh Air"

  • 8. "Arcadia" by Lauren Groff: "'Arcadia' captures our painful nostalgia for an idyllic past we never really had." -- Ron Charles, Washington Post

  • 7. "Gone Girl" by Gillian Flynn: "When a young wife disappears on the morning of her fifth wedding anniversary, her husband becomes the automatic suspect in this compulsively readable thriller, which is as rich with sardonic humor and social satire as it is unexpected plot twists." -- Marjorie Kehe, Christian Science Monitor

  • 6. "How Should a Person Be" by Sheila Heti: "There was a reason this book was so talked about, and it’s because Heti has tapped into something great." -- Jason Diamond, Vol. 1 Brooklyn

  • 4. TIE "NW" by Zadie Smith and "Far From the Tree" by Andrew Solomon: "Zadie Smith’s 'NW' is going to enter the canon for the sheer audacity of the book’s project." -- Roxane Gay, New York Times "'Far From the Tree' by Andrew Solomon is, to my mind, a life-changing book, one that's capable of overturning long-standing ideas of identity, family and love." -- Laura Miller, Salon

  • 3. "Billy Lynn's Long Halftime Walk" by Ben Fountain: "'Billy Lynn's Long Halftime Walk' says a lot about where we are today," says Marjorie Kehe of the Christian Science Monitor. "Pretty much the whole point of that novel," adds Time's Lev Grossman.

  • 2. "Bring Up the Bodies" by Hilary Mantel: "Even more accomplished than the preceding novel in this sequence, 'Wolf Hall,' Mantel's new installment in the fictionalized life of Thomas Cromwell -- master secretary and chief fixer to Henry VIII -- is a high-wire act, a feat of novelistic derring-do." -- Laura Miller, Salon

  • 1. "Behind the Beautiful Forevers" by Katherine Boo: "Like the most remarkable literary nonfiction, it reads with the bite of a novel and opens up a corner of the world that most of us know absolutely nothing about. It stuck with me all year." -- Eric Banks, president of the National Book Critics Circle

  • Recent Slide Shows

  • Share on Twitter
  • Share on Facebook
  • Thumbnails
  • Fullscreen
  • 1 of 10

Related Videos

More Related Stories

Comments

 3 Comments

Comment Preview

Your name will appear as username ( profile | log out )

You may use these HTML tags and attributes: <a href=""> <b> <em> <strong> <i> <blockquote>

follow salon

Most Read

From Around the Web

Recommendations