Summers Earned Millions in D.E. Shaw Salary, Bank Speech Fees

[notesdev]

April 4 (Bloomberg) -- Lawrence Summers, director of President Barack Obama’s National Economic Council, earned millions working at a hedge fund and speaking to banks such as Citigroup Inc. that later received taxpayer bailout money.

Hedge fund D.E. Shaw & Co. paid Summers more than $5 million in salary other compensation in the past 16 months, according to a financial disclosure form released by the White House yesterday. Summers served as a managing director at the New York-based firm. Summers, a former Treasury secretary, also earned more than $2.7 million in speaking fees.

“There was considerable interest in hearing his economic insights,” said Ben LaBolt, a White House spokesman. At the White House, Summers “has been at the forefront of this administration’s work to shore up our nation’s financial system and to put in place a regulatory framework that will strengthen the financial system,” LaBolt said.

The disclosure statement for Summers and several other top administration officials illustrates the quandary Obama and his predecessors have faced in their personnel decisions because “powerful people are almost always also rich people” who have earned money from private interests, said Steffen Schmidt, a political science professor at Iowa State University in Ames, Iowa.

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story in full here:
http://www.bloomberg.com/apps/news?pid=20601087&sid=a4iGjejJVRko&refer=home

[MannyGoldstein]

1. No Shit? And People Wonder Why I'm Apoplectic About These Vermin.

Summers is a blight upon the Middle Class. With Clinton, he engineered economy-destroying wholesale financial deregulation and job-obliterating almost-free trade with China. Now he's engineered the latest "Hey bankers! Here's a few trillion, heads you win, tails we lose" banker bailout. Coincidentally, he's collecting huge buckets of cash from bankers, as are virtually all of the other former Clinton appointees.

But whenever I point to these facts, I get a load of "But they're Democrats! You need to support the administration no matter what they do!"

Earth to sycophants: just because a person *calls themself* a Democrat doesn't mean that they *are* a Democrat. Certain basics apply, like not working to economically sodomize the Middle Class at every turn.

[leftofthedial]

2. Barack!

Your masters are showing!

[soryang]

3. Where are the prosecutions?

Naked short selling brought down Bear Stearns and Lehman Bros. Naked short selling is illegal. Oops, down the memory hole. I guess that's what you get for paying millions to the President's economic advisor.

Being f.....d as the saying goes assumes that there is nothing you can do about something. But that is wrong. We are not talking about evading regulation and laws we are talking about fraud, felony fraud and conspiracy to commit fraud by our largest financial institutions. There should be grand juries convened and indictments, trials and prison terms to follow.

First of all, a collaterized debt obligation is not secured or backed by collateral at all. A mortgage backed security is not backed by mortgage like protections under the law. A CDO is not backed by anything as a consumer loan is under the uniform commercial code, these are the initial two falsehoods or frauds from which the edifice of off balance sheet accounting arose.
How then did they get off balance sheet to permit more overly leveraged lending by the investment bankers? Easy, the big five got Greenberg to find a patsy at AIG to market credit default swaps. These illegal insurance devices were backed by nothing. AIG was the victim really of an investment bank ponzi scheme.

Yes AIG actions were criminal felonies in every case but the conspiracy emerged from the investment banks. Greenberg and his flunky should be in front of a grand jury. This isn't a crank opinion. READ THIS:

http://market-ticker.org/archives/923-FLASH-AIG-CA...
FLASH: AIG CALLED CRIMINAL SCAM!The Market TickerThursday, April 2. 2009Posted by Karl Denninger at 08:55

FLASH: AIG CALLED CRIMINAL SCAM!(Credit Barry Ritholtz and Institutional Risk Analytics, the original source)

"WHOAH!

In fact, our investigation suggests that by the time AIG had entered the CDS fray in a serious way more than five years ago, the firm was already doomed. No longer able to prop up its earnings using reinsurance because of growing scrutiny from state insurance regulators and federal law enforcement agencies, AIG’s foray into CDS was really the grand finale. AIG was a Ponzi scheme plain and simple, yet the Obama Administration still thinks of AIG as a real company that simply took excessive risks. No, to us what the fraud Bernard Madoff is to individual investors, AIG is to the global financial community.

As with the phony reinsurance contracts that AIG and other insurers wrote for decades, when AIG wrote hundreds of billions of dollars in CDS contracts, neither AIG nor the counterparties believed that the CDS would ever be paid. Indeed, one source with personal knowledge of the matter suggests that there may be emails and actual side letters between AIG and its counterparties that could prove conclusively that AIG never intended to pay out on any of its CDS contracts.

Read that folks.
Then read it again.
Then read it AGAIN.
...."
go to the link above to read more.