Neel Kashkari

On October 6 US Treasury Secretary Henry Paulson named Neel Kashkari to head the Treasury’s new Office of Financial Stability (OFS). The OFS is charged with paying out $700 billion to Wall Street banks and other financial firms in exchange for their failed mortgage-backed assets, under the terms of the bailout signed into law by President Bush on October 3.

Kashkari’s identity is thus a matter of considerable public interest. Only 35 years old, Kashkari joined the Treasury in 2006 “as a Senior Advisor to US Treasury Secretary Henry M. Paulson,” according to his official Treasury Department biography. At the time, Paulson was giving up his job as CEO of Wall Street investment bank Goldman Sachs to join the Treasury.

The biography continues, “Prior to joining the Treasury Department, Mr. Kashkari was a Vice-President of Goldman Sachs & Co. in San Francisco, where he led Goldman’s IT Security Investment Banking practice, advising public and private companies on mergers and acquisitions and financial transactions.”

Despite his high rank, Kashkari has only a few years of experience in finance. After initially studying aerospace engineering at the University of Illinois, he worked at defense firm TRW on contract projects from the US space agency NASA, before switching careers and attending the Wharton School of Business in Philadelphia. He joined Goldman Sachs after graduating from Wharton in 2002.

Once at the Treasury, Kashkari helped prepare the recently passed bailout. The Wall Street Journal wrote, “Mr. Kashkari was part of the Treasury team that negotiated the asset-repurchase program with Congress [...] He was also one of the originators of the plan. Last year, he and Phillip Swagel, assistant secretary for economic policy, crafted a proposal called ‘break the glass’—referring to the emergency nature of using such a tool—which envisioned Treasury buying bad loans and other assets.”

Kashkari’s history highlights the extraordinary influence of Goldman Sachs, a firm that stands massively to benefit from the bailout its former executives have organized at the Treasury. Not only does Goldman now have the option of unloading its failed mortgage-backed assets on the Treasury, but it stands to make large sums from carrying out the actual transactions of the bailout program itself.

From: Picked to direct the Wall Street bailout: Who is Neel Kashkari?