Word: whitely
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...President made his announcement while standing next to the unlikeliest populist advocate for financial reform, 82-year-old former Federal Reserve chairman Paul Volcker, a previously marginalized Obama adviser who had chastised the Administration for making insufficient efforts to limit the size and risk profiles of big banks. The White House is tired of complaints that its economic team - especially Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner, the former New York Fed president who helped bail out AIG and other failing firms - is too close to Wall Street. Bringing the legendary gray eminence in from the cold - Obama called his plan...
...allergic to populists, and so are his aides. Behind closed doors, Treasury officials can sound like their MoveOn.org caricatures, griping about "wacko populists" who use "anticapitalist rhetoric" to "extract their pound of flesh from the Street" - even making excuses for the megabankers who no-showed a recent White House meeting with Obama. ("I wouldn't say they blew him off," said one Treasury aide.) Geithner has opposed proposals to tax Wall Street bonuses as well as financial transactions, infuriating the left. And he made quite a few of those how-can-we-help calls to floundering bankers when...
...whom he was chairing an obscure economic-recovery board. Congressman Paul Kanjorski says that last March, when he pitched Volcker on a plan to let regulators break up big banks that threatened the financial system, the former Fed chair said, "I'm out of vogue right now in the White House ... but I agree." Volcker secured his walk-on-water reputation by taming runaway inflation in the late 1970s, jacking up interest rates and ignoring intense public pressure to reverse course. His grandpa-in-the-attic status in Obamaworld seemed to suggest an Administration too cozy with the Street...
...fact, while Volcker did have some policy disagreements with Geithner and National Economic Council chairman Larry Summers - who were not eager to dismantle large banks and did not see how proprietary trading contributed to the crisis - those ideas had support from White House economists like Christina Romer and Austan Goolsbee of the Council of Economic Advisers and Jared Bernstein in Vice President Joe Biden's office. Volcker was never really persona non grata; he's friendly with Biden, and Goolsbee says Volcker spoke "extensively and repeatedly" with all the key players - including Obama. Still, White House officials were increasingly frustrated...
...political aides were eager to adopt a more populist tone, urging Treasury to give them something they could use. The bank tax was already in the works, but after Volcker made his case at a White House meeting in October, the rest of the Administration started shifting his way. Giant firms like Goldman Sachs were raking in record profits, and financiers ranging from British central banker Mervyn King to former Citigroup chairman John Reed were endorsing the Volcker rule. (See the worst business deals...