Salon.com > Treasury Secretary

Jack Lew’s loopy signature showing signs of improvement

Wed, 08 May 2013 14:18:00 +0000

WASHINGTON (AP) — Treasury Secretary Jacob Lew may not have succeeded yet in getting a grand budget bargain with Congress, but at least his handwriting is improving. And it is expected to be even better when the time comes for him to affix his "Jacob Lew" to the nation's currency.

Lew's handwriting was so bad before that it even drew presidential notice.

President Barack Obama joked in January when he nominated Lew for the Treasury post that he had never noticed before how illegible Lew's signature was. Lew served as Obama's chief of staff and also as director of the Office of Management and Budget before taking the Treasury job.

Lew's scrawl as OMB director consisted of a series of loops that bore no resemblance to his name.

More disingenuous GOP obstruction

Thu, 21 Feb 2013 18:30:00 +0000

Chuck Hagel isn’t the only Obama nominee Senate Republicans are raking through the coals for dubious political reasons.The President's pick to head the Treasury, Jack Lew, is getting his own hazing.

Although it got less publicity than Hagel's hearing, Lew, too, faced a torrent of tough questions during his first round of confirmation hearings before the Senate Finance Committee earlier this month. Now, this week, Sen. Chuck Grassley, the number two Republican on the panel, is stepping up the pressure.

Yesterday, he asked Committee Chairman Max Baucus to postpone a vote on Lew’s confirmation until the he answers more of Grassley’s questions (a request Baucus denied).

At issue for Grassley is a series of loans provided to Lew in the early 2000s, especially one for $1.4 million in 2002 from New York University, where Lew served as executive vice president. Lew said the loan was to help pay for housing and was part of his compensation package, but couldn’t recall some of the details Grassley demanded.

Jack Lew’s union-busting past

Wed, 09 Jan 2013 22:00:00 +0000

With President Obama poised to tap current chief of staff Jack Lew as his next treasury secretary, Republicans are already attacking Lew for supposed slights during budget talks. Some progressives may bring renewed scrutiny to his time at CitiGroup. But if history is any guide, there will be little talk about another line on Lew’s résumé: The key role he played in New York University’s campaign to rid itself of a graduate student workers’ union.

Lew, the former director of the Office of Management and Budget under President Clinton, joined NYU as chief operating officer and executive vice president in 2004. At the time, NYU was the only private university in the United States whose graduate students had a union contract. By the time Lew left two years later, NYU graduate students had lost their collective bargaining rights. In between, picketers hoisted “Wanted” posters with his face on them.

Reports: Obama to nominate Jack Lew for treasury secretary

Wed, 09 Jan 2013 16:37:00 +0000

President Obama will reportedly nominate his current chief of staff Jack Lew to replace Timothy Geithner as treasury secretary, according to reports from Bloomberg Businessweek and the Associated Press.

From Hans Nichols at Businessweek, who cites "a person familiar with the process":

Lew, 57, who also has served as director of the Office of Management and Budget, has been offered the Treasury post by Obama, according to the person, who asked for anonymity to discuss personnel matters.

Geithner, 51, the only remaining member of Obama’s original economic team, has told White House officials he doesn’t’ want to serve in a second term and intends to leave the job by the end of the month.

A dream SEC chief

Thu, 06 Dec 2012 15:30:00 +0000

On Dec. 14, Mary Schapiro will step down from her role as the chairwoman of the Securities and Exchange Commission. Barack Obama will shortly appoint a new leader to take her place, a leader who has a big task in rebuilding the credibility of an agency tasked with protecting the capital markets from fraud and ensuring transparency in the markets. I've asked Neil Barofsky, whose name has been floated by Simon Johnson in the New York Times as a possible chairman for the agency, what he would do to reform the Securities and Exchange Commission.

The stakes are high. In the 1930s, the SEC cleaned up a stock market that had gone out of control, rigged by insiders and ultimately wrecking the economy. During this most recent financial crisis, the SEC operated as Barofsky put it, as a "backwater.” SEC Chairman Chris Cox was known as a passive regulator who did not understand the markets. Whistle-blower Harry Markopoulos later embarrassed the SEC by revealing he had tried to tell them about Bernie Madoff's $20 billion-plus fraud for eight years, to no avail. Obama appointee Mary Schapiro has done marginally better, but the SEC has still been battered in the courts and in Congress. And Schapiro recently lost a high-profile fight to regulate money market funds, which were a key part of the highly vulnerable shadow banking system.