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Neal Wolin, Treasury Nominee, Helped Draft Legislation Deregulating Banks
Hmmm. This isnt exactly confidence inspiring.Tim Geithners 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. 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 todays mess and his role drafting it could come under questioning at his upcoming confirmation hearings. Our reporter, Ryan Derousseau, came across Wolins role in researching our big profile of Wolin at WhoRunsGov.com. Stuart Eizenstat, a deputy Treasury secretary under Bill Clinton, confirmed that as Treasurys general counsel at the time, Wolin provided the technical and legal drafting for the Gramm-Leach-Bliley Act. As Ryan writes, the Act hasnt been directly blamed for todays meltdown. But it did pave the way for the birth of huge financial companies like Citigroup that were deemed too big to fail when their mortgage bets went belly-up and the credit market evaporated. The government, of course, had to bail out these institutions with billions in taxpayer dollars. Wolin who was picked after several other candidates passed on the slot did the legal work under then-Treasury Secretary Larry Summers, who is now Obamas head of the National Economic Council. The difference here is that Summers post, unlike Wolins, is a non-confirmable one, so he hasnt been pressed publicly on Gramm-Leach-Bliley. The question now is whether Wolin will come under sharp questioning over his role in creating it. The Treasury Department has yet to comment. In other Treasury news first reported this morning by The Huffington Post the department is launching an interesting new interactive website today that is intended to bring transparency to he Obama administrations recovery programs. Posted by: Beavis 2009-04-01 |
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