If you worried that ex-Treasury Sec'y Tim Geithner would wind up on food stamps (or no food stamps), you can rest easy

Daily Kos caption: "Ka-CHING!!!"

TIMOTHY F. GEITHNER TO JOIN WARBURG PINCUS
AS PRESIDENT AND MANAGING DIRECTOR

New York, November 16, 2013 –- Warburg Pincus, a leading global private equity firm focused on growth investing, today announced the appointment of Timothy F. Geithner as President and Managing Director. Mr. Geithner also will be a member of the firm’s Executive Management Group.

In his role, Mr. Geithner will work closely with Warburg Pincus’ Co-Chief Executive Officers, Charles R. Kaye and Joseph P. Landy, on overall firm strategy and management, investing and portfolio management, organizational and funding structure, and investor relations.

by Ken

in my recent post "Ooh, that Obama," I showcased some of Ian Welsh's November 14 musings on "The Obamacare Fiasco," musings that are highly relevant to tonight's subject. "The problem with Obama," Ian wrote,

has always been this sickening need to be one of the boys. He appears to genuinely like and genuinely admire the people who have "made it" in this society -- people like Jamie Dimon and the people who run insurance and drug companies. He thinks you can make deals with these people, and make sure everyone wins. You can't. These people are the most successful parasites ever produced by our nasty form of sociopathic capitalism. You can only give them what they want or you can rip them from the body politic, so they stop sucking the blood from the host they're killing.

An important observation was subsequently tucked into parentheses: "Rest assured, Obama, like Clinton, will make tens of millions miraculously quickly on leaving office." Isn't this, after all, what keeps the whole system going? We like to pretend that our public servants are working for, you know, us, when in fact they're working for "the people who have 'made it' in this society," and are consequently rewarded -- or threatened with nonreward or even punishment -- according to their performance for their real bosses.

Which brings us to former Treasury Secretary Tim Geithner, aka "The Tiniest Tim of Them All." Off his performance through the Great Economic Meltdown and its aftermath, well-wishers could be forgiven wondering whether he would ever work again.

But that's looking only at Timmy's performance on behalf of Us the People. And here I have to disagree with Daily Kos's brooklynbadboy, in "Geithner cashes in . . . ahhhhhh," whose take is:

Must be nice.

Tim Geithner, of course, has no experience as a banker, an investor, a trader, a venture capitalist, a speculator, or businessman of any sort. So naturally he will be boss of those that actually do. No no. He has been, all his life, that special breed of person known as the Ivy League Economist. He's worked at think tanks, in government, and for the Federal Reserve. He comes from a Mayflower family. His education has been mostly the study of Asia.

It is from these credentials that he now, following his mentor Larry Summers, proceeds in heading up the private equity branch of one of the world's most storied banking families. He is certain, like Summers, to become very, very rich doing...something that almost certainly is not work. Instead, he will most likely make a bundle on carried interest, which is how private equity executives avoid paying taxes like the rest of us.

The American elite establishment ladies and gentleman, for your viewing pleasure. From being asleep at the wheel as a banking regulator during the worst financial crash since the Depression, to wealthy millionaire banker.

Failing Up. It's the new American way.

The image of our Timmy as "asleep at the wheel" seems to me correct only if you're measuring him by that standard I was just talking about: serving the American public. All the accounts I've heard, however, indicate that far from being a financial-sector Heckuva Job Brownie, Timmy was a veritable whirling dervish of activity regarding the bailout and the myriad regulatory issues that descended upon us in the meltdown's wake. It's just that he was working tirelessly to ensure that the sorting out of winners and losers was done correctly, meaning that the kind of people he regarded as born to rule wound up being rewarded and made whole, or as whole as circumstances permitted, and the check for it was picked up by, well, somebody else.

Similarly, it seems to me that BBB is way too hard on our Timmy credential-wise. In all career -- including those five-plus years as president of the New York Fed (to describe this as "working for the Federal Reserve" seems to me wildly misleading) and four years as Treasury secretary -- he has been involved, and often intimately involved in many of those areas of finance that come into play in his new job. Perhaps more importantly, he knows at least as anyone walking where the mythical line between the "allowable" and "unallowable" regarding government interference in free enterprise may be found. Are there many people who wouldn't return his phone calls?

That said, I assume he will have the sense to allow the people who will be working "for" him to ply their expertise, and there will be other people around the premises to fill in the gaps in his specific knowledge. Although it appears to have fallen to Warburg Pincus to provide Timmy with his first jolt of payback for years of faithful service, I don't think they'll begrudge the little feller as much as a dollar of his compensation. They have every reason to hope that his presence will amply repay their modest investment.

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