From Glenn Greenwald writing for Salon this past weekend:
White House officials yesterday released their personal financial disclosure forms, and included in the millions of dollars which top Obama economics adviser Larry Summers made from Wall Street in 2008 is this detail:
Lawrence H. Summers, one of President Obama's top economic advisers, collected roughly $5.2 million in compensation from hedge fund D.E. Shaw over the past year and was paid more than $2.7 million in speaking fees by several troubled Wall Street firms and other organizations. . . .
Financial institutions including JP Morgan Chase, Citigroup, Goldman Sachs, Lehman Brothers and Merrill Lynch paid Summers for speaking appearances in 2008. Fees ranged from $45,000 for a Nov. 12 Merrill Lynch appearance to $135,000 for an April 16 visit to Goldman Sachs, according to his disclosure form.
That's $135,000 paid by Goldman Sachs to Summers -- for a one-day visit. And the payment was made at a time -- in April, 2008 -- when everyone assumed that the next President would either be Barack Obama or Hillary Clinton and that Larry Summers would therefore become exactly what he now is: the most influential financial official in the U.S. Government (and the $45,000 Merrill Lynch payment came 8 days after Obama's election). Goldman would not be able to make a one-day $135,000 payment to Summers now that he is Obama's top economics adviser, but doing so a few months beforehand was obviously something about which neither parties felt any compunction. It's basically an advanced bribe. And it's paying off in spades. And none of it seemed to bother Obama in the slightest when he first strongly considered naming Summers as Treasury Secretary and then named him his top economics adviser instead (thereby avoiding the need for Senate confirmation), knowing that Summers would exert great influence in determining who benefited from the government's response to the financial crisis.
Enough said.
— Hilary Collins, PA
How are Lawrence Summers' relationships with DEShaw, other hedge funds and banks, different from Dick Cheney's relationships with Halliburton, the oil companies and the defense industry?
— Robert Henry Eller, Milan, Italy
Summers is just one of the academics who both fueled this 40 year ponzi scheme to make MBAs from elite universities like Hrvard and Penn Wharton school the kings of the world.
what did this lockstep army of academics get? money, tenure book deals but adulation fo the crowds. They wanted that time on the stage
The biggest disappointment of this entire meltdown is the duplicity and greed of colege proessors.
they committed the age old sin of lying to their students for personal gain.
shame
soon the entire extent of this corruption of university faculties will come to light.
it will include their complicity in the securitization of school loans, software deals, on line universities you name it .
but it was in their books that they lied about our american history our constitution our heritage that they had the most damage.
— Publicola, Philadelphia
Why shouldn't a brilliant, superbly-connected economist monetize his intelligence?
The real issue with Larry and with too many of Barack's brilliant team is that they are financiers - not industrialists. That's the first half of their problem.
Their fixes for companies and banks are to muck with their balance sheets.
What is needed are jobs. Well-paying. Private-sector (or, at least, at the public-private interphase - like utilities).
Nothing that's being done - other than flooding the economy with money to get people and companies to buy things - is retaining or creating jobs.
The second half of their problem is that they believe they can socially engineer. Green cars. Green energy.
Yet, they deliberately avoid looking at the most successful, economically validated, examples of each - both, actually, in Europe.
France, for nuclear energy.
All of Europe, for a simple gas tax.
Creating, on a large competitive scale, jobs where people make or do things that other people willingly buy and use requires an intelligence akin to - perhaps even beyond - investment banking.
The social engineering? They will figure out what they actually need to do shortly before the 2010 election.
Or shortly after.
— W in the Middle, New York State
