Wiki: Jack Lew

Jacob Joseph "Jack" Lew (born August 29, 1955) is an American government administrator and attorney who is the 76th and current United States Secretary of the Treasury, serving since 2013. He served as the 26th White House Chief of Staff from 2012 to 2013. Lew previously served as Director of the Office of Management and Budget in the Clinton and Obama Administrations, and is a member of the Democratic Party.

Born in New York City, Lew received his A.B. from Harvard College and his J.D. from Georgetown University Law Center. Lew began his career as a legislative assistant to Representative Joe Moakley and as a senior policy adviser to former House Speaker Tip O'Neill. Lew then worked as an attorney in private practice before working as a deputy in Boston's office of management and budget. In 1993, he began work for the Clinton Administration as Special Assistant to the President. In 1994 Lew served as Associate Director for Legislative Affairs and Deputy Director of the Office of Management and Budget, where he served as Director of that agency from 1998 to 2001 and from 2010 to 2012. After leaving the Clinton Administration, Lew worked as the Executive Vice President for Operations at New York University from 2001 to 2006, and as the COO at Citigroup from 2006 to 2008. Lew then served as the first Deputy Secretary of State for Management and Resources, from 2009 to 2010.

On January 10, 2013, Lew was nominated as the replacement for retiring Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner, to serve in President Barack Obama's second term.[1] On February 27, 2013, the Senate confirmed Lew for the position. He was sworn in the following day...

...In June 2006, Lew was named chief operating officer of Citigroup's Alternative Investments unit, a proprietary trading group. The unit he oversaw invested in a hedge fund "that bet on the housing market to collapse."[22] During his work at Citigroup, Lew had invested heavily in funds in Ugland House while he worked as an investment banker at Citigroup during the 2008 financial meltdown.[23] Lew also had oversight of Citigroup subsidiaries in countries including, Bermuda, the Cayman Islands, and Hong Kong; and during his time at Citigroup, Citigroup subsidiaries in the Cayman Islands increased to 113.[24]

Lew co-chaired the Advisory Board for City Year New York.[25] He is a member of the Council on Foreign Relations, the Brookings Institution Hamilton Project Advisory Board, and the National Academy of Social Insurance.[26] Lew is also a member of the bar in Massachusetts and the District of Columbia.[27]...

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jack_Lew

Icelandic Justice and Criminal Bankers

On September 15, 2008, a former Goldman Sachs chairman, US Treasury Secretary Henry Paulsen, deliberately triggered a predictable global financial meltdown when he decided to break precedent and let Lehman Bros, the fourth-largest Wall Street investment bank, go bankrupt. The reasons for his decision are for another time. The fallout from that traumatic financial crisis remains very much with the world financial system to this day, more than seven years later. One of the little-noticed casualties of that Lehman Bros. debacle was the worst banking crisis in the history of one of the world’s smallest countries, Iceland. How that country of 323,000 citizens chose to deal with the crisis is a model for the rest of the world. Instead of beatifying the criminal bankers responsible for worst world financial crisis in history, the people of Iceland did something quite different.

Iceland, a beautiful Nordic island in the far North Atlantic between Greenland and Norway, with active volcanoes, streams with some of the most delicious non-industrial and non-GMO wild salmon, self-sufficient in energy from thermal springs and hydroelectric power, got lured into the mad, greed-driven frenzy of the US sub-prime real estate crisis in a big way. In October 2008, amid the global financial Tsunami triggered by Paulsen’s Lehman act, the Iceland government nationalized the three largest private banks, Glitnir, Landsbanki and Kaupthing, following depositor panic withdrawals. The three banks, in a few short years after they were privatized had managed to amass debts ten times Iceland’s annual DGP.

When a group of sensible US economists proposed Paulsen nationalize the top Wall Street banks behind the crisis–JP Morgan Chase, Citigroup, Bank of America, Goldman Sachs– to restore order and keep credit flowing to the real economy, he replied that would be “socialism. We don’t do that in America.” Instead, Paulsen’s US Treasury used hundreds of billions of US taxpayer dollars to buy non-voting shares of the Wall Street banks, meaning the Government didn’t demand any say in the banks’ policies in return. That might be called bankers’ socialism–privatize the profits and socialize the losses.

By November 2008 the UK and Dutch investors in a now-defunct savings scheme of Landsbanki, Icesave, found their hundreds of millions of Pounds of investments were, indeed, frozen like ice—their savings were frozen ice. When the British government demanded of the Iceland government the repayment of the deposits in the UK branches of the formerly private Landsbanki bank, an international dispute, known as the Icesave dispute, erupted. The British government invoked anti-terrorism legislation against Iceland in order to freeze the UK-based assets of Kaupthing, Iceland’s biggest bank, bankrupting the bank. Iceland’s government turned to the IMF for a $5 billion bailout, the first European country since Italy in 1976 to do so...

http://journal-neo.org/2016/04/17/icelandic-justice-and-criminal-bankers/

Saudi Arabia Threatens To Liquidate Its Treasury Holdings If Congress Probes Its Role In Sept 11 Attacks

Back in January, when the market was watching in shocked silence as oil prices were crashing to decade lows and as concerns emerged that Saudi Arabia may need to commence selling its vast, if unquantified, USD reserves, we wrote a post titled "Attention Finally Turns To Saudi Arabia's "Secret" US Treasury Holdings" where we noted something very surprising: whereas we do know that Saudi Arabia is the owner of the world's third largest USD reserves...

... their actual composition remains as a secret, because while the US discloses the explicit Treasury holdings of all other nations, Saudi Arabia's holdings, for some unknown reason, are not officially disclosed.

"It’s a secret of the vast U.S. Treasury market, a holdover from an age of oil shortages and mighty petrodollars," Bloomberg wrote of Saudi Arabia’s US Treasury holdings.

"As a matter of policy, the Treasury has never disclosed the holdings of Saudi Arabia, long a key ally in the volatile Middle East, and instead groups it with 14 other mostly OPEC nations including Kuwait, the United Arab Emirates and Nigeria,” Bloomberg goes on to note, adding that the rules are different for almost everyone else. Although Saudi Arabia's "secret" is protected by "an unusual blackout by the U.S. Treasury Department," for more than a hundred other countries, from China to the Vatican, the Treasury provides a detailed breakdown of how much U.S. debt each holds."

So who does know how much US paper the Saudis are sitting on? Well, the Saudis of course,"a handful of Treasury officials," and some bureaucrats at the Fed, Bloomberg says, noting that “for everyone else, it’s a guessing game."

Yes, a “guessing game,” but one that will very soon have profound consequences for markets and for geopolitics.

We closed with a simple, if suddenly very prophetic question:

"who would be the new patron saint of the US Treasury Department in the event the Saudis drawdown all of their reserves and decide to diversify away from USD assets... Put differently, who will monetize the US deficit if relations between Washington and Riyadh hit the skids over Iran?"
It is this question that has suddenly reemerged with a bang, and could rock the US administration to its core as what until recently was a "fringe conspiracy theory" is suddenly exposed as an all too unpleasant fact, and becomes the biggest political scandal to rock the U.S. in years, in the process maybe even crushing the friendly diplomatic relations the U.S. has held for years with its biggest Mid-East ally, Saudi Arabia.

* * *

First, a quick tangent: we have been greatly surprised by the reemergence of the topic of September 11 in recent weeks, and specifically the taboo - in official circles - issue whether there was a "Saudi connection" in the biggest terrorist attack on US soil. Just last weekend, out of the blue, 60 Minutes held segment on the "28 pages" that were classified in the Congressional investigative report into 9/11 - pages that allegedly confirm the Saudi connection.

To be sure, Saudi officials have long denied that the kingdom had any role in the Sept. 11 plot, and the 9/11 Commission found “no evidence that the Saudi government as an institution or senior Saudi officials individually funded the organization.” But critics have noted that the commission’s narrow wording left open the possibility that less senior officials or parts of the Saudi government could have played a role. Suspicions have lingered, partly because of the conclusions of a 2002 congressional inquiry into the attacks that cited some evidence that Saudi officials living in the United States at the time had a hand in the plot.

Those conclusions, contained in 28 pages of the report, still have not been released publicly. It was the surprising rekindled focus on these 28 pages in recent days that suggested that something may have been afoot.

Something was...

http://www.zerohedge.com/news/2016-04-16/saudi-arabia-threatens-us-it-will-liquidate-its-treasury-holdings-if-congress-passes

U.S. to let spy agencies scour Americans' finances

(Reuters) - The Obama administration is drawing up plans to give all U.S. spy agencies full access to a massive database that contains financial data on American citizens and others who bank in the country, according to a Treasury Department document seen by Reuters.

The proposed plan represents a major step by U.S. intelligence agencies to spot and track down terrorist networks and crime syndicates by bringing together financial databanks, criminal records and military intelligence. The plan, which legal experts say is permissible under U.S. law, is nonetheless likely to trigger intense criticism from privacy advocates.

Financial institutions that operate in the United States are required by law to file reports of "suspicious customer activity," such as large money transfers or unusually structured bank accounts, to Treasury's Financial Crimes Enforcement Network (FinCEN).

http://www.reuters.com/article/2013/03/13/usa-banks-spying-idINDEE92C0EH20130313

Office of Foreign Assets Control - Specially Designated Nationals List

"...The Specially Designated Nationals (SDN) List is a publication of OFAC which lists individuals and organizations with whom United States citizens and permanent residents are prohibited from doing business.[3] This list differs from the one maintained pursuant to Section 314(a) of the USA PATRIOT Act.[13]

Thousands of individuals and companies are currently designated on the OFAC SDN List including the following:..."

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Office_of_Foreign_Assets_Control#Specially_Designated_Nationals_List