There are dozens of reasons to dismiss President Obama’s self-made scourge-of-Wall Street image and three of them are his chiefs of staff.
Rahm Emanuel is a Goldman Sachs alumnus who left the Clinton administration to make $16 million in two and a half years in private equity where he used his political connections to get clients and make money for them.
Bill Daley never worked for Goldman — he worked for JP Morgan. He also sat on the board of Fannie Mae and ran a union-owned bank that made money off the city of Chicago, where his brother was mayor.
And now Obama’s got his third Wall Street chief of staff in Jack Lew of Citigroup. Lew got a nearly one-million-dollar bonus from Citigroup months taxpayers bailed the bank out.
But as far as millionaire revolving-door politically connected banker buddies of Barack Obama who profited off the taxpayers go, Lew has a relatively clean record. The critique of Lew is not that he helped Citi game the system, but that he may have helped Citi correctly invest. In other words, Lew is more Mitt Romney than Newt Gingrich.
Shahien Nasirapour at Huffington Post writes:
Goldman, JP Morgan, Citigroup…. Some Obama pals at Morgan Stanley are probably already checking out the cost of a moving truck to D.C.
