It's bad enough the new economic team is stacked full of former Citi bankers and friends of Robert Rubin who helped usher in this economic crisis. Now it's getting to be ridiculous with even more people on the wrong side of this debate. Maybe having an empty team was a better option after all. The Plum Line:
Tim Geithner’s new nominee for number two at the Treasury Department, Neal Wolin, played a key role in drafting legislation in the late 1990s deregulating the banking system, a former Treasury Department official confirms to us.Josh Orton thinks this is "obnoxious" and adds:
The law that Wolin helped draft has been blamed by some critics, many of them Democrats, for easing up regulatory pressure on huge financial institutions, tangentially helping create today’s mess — and his role drafting it could come under questioning at his upcoming confirmation hearings.
Our reporter, Ryan Derousseau, came across Wolin’s role in researching our big profile of Wolin at WhoRunsGov.com. Stuart Eizenstat, a deputy Treasury secretary under Bill Clinton, confirmed that as Treasury’s general counsel at the time, Wolin “provided the technical and legal drafting” for the Gramm-Leach-Bliley Act.
The WH thinks Krugman's "naive," doesn't talk to him, and puts the deregulators in charge. Urg.Double urg.
