Courtesy of Pam Martens.
Jack Lew Testifying at His Confirmation Hearing, February 13, 2013
U.S. Treasury Secretary Jack Lew, whose loan dealings with New York University and acceptance of $940,000 in bonus money from taxpayer bailout funds paid to the insolvent Citigroup in early 2009 rendered him a scandalous choice for the high treasury post in the Obama administration, is fully living up to his past reputation.
Last Thursday, May 2, the U.S. Treasury released its “Daily Treasury Guidance” which lets the public know what the U.S. Treasury Secretary will be doing each day on behalf of the taxpayer who is paying his salary and on whose behalf he is supposed to be working.
The guidance for last Thursday noted that Secretary Lew would be departing Washington for New York in the afternoon “where he will attend a roundtable with business leaders hosted by the Council on Foreign Relations (CFR) to discuss the state of the U.S. and global economies. This meeting is closed press.”
The words “closed press” together with the words Jack Lew and New York apparently caused curiosity at the international wire service, Reuters. The media outlet learned that Lew would be having dinner with Jamie Dimon, Chairman and CEO of JPMorgan Chase, along with an assortment of hedge fund kingpins.
Dimon is in serious hot water with his regulators. The firm that he heads has incurred over $16 billion in legal expenses over the past three years attempting to ward off lawsuits and investigations covering a breathtaking sweep of alleged wrongdoing. The London Whale debacle, where a unit of the bank gambled away over $6 billion of depositors’ money in London, has received the most press but it is just one speck of the whale of a mess at JPMorgan.
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