Paul Volcker - chosen by Obama to head Economic Recovery Advisory Board:
Volcker needs no introduction. His history includes stints with the US Treasury Department, the Federal Reserve, and Chase Manhattan Bank. As under-secretary of the Treasury, Volcker "played an important role in the decisions surrounding the U.S. decision to suspend gold convertibility in 1971, which resulted in the collapse of the Bretton Woods system." (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paul_Volcker - under "Career") De-linking the dollar from gold of course opened the floodgates for the FED's ensuing explosion of reserve currency printing (and hence explosion of our national debt) powering the easy money system and leading inevitably to today's financial meltdown. But other things instrumental to the crisis also have Volcker's fingerprints all over them. As of October 2006, Volcker has been the Chairman of the Board of Trustees of the influential Washington-based financial advisory body, the Group of Thirty, whose "groundbreaking work on derivatives, Derivatives: Practices and Principles, published in 1993 was commissioned in the 1990s just as the use of derivatives grew and began to move into the mainstream of finance." (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Group_of_Thirty - under "Derivatives")
And Volcker's association's with the corporate elite go way beyond his work with The Group of Thirty, the onslaught of derivatives, and even his tenure as FED Chairman: "He has had a long association with the Rockefeller family, not only with his positions at Chase Bank and the Trilateral Commission, but also through membership of the Trust Committee of Rockefeller Group, Inc. (RGI), which he joined in 1987. That entity managed, at one time, the Rockefeller Center on behalf of the numerous members of the Rockefeller clan. He currently serves as Chairman of the Board of Trustees of the International House in Manhattan, NY. He was a founding member of the Trilateral Commission." (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paul_Volcker under "Post- FED")
Incidently, both Larry Summers (head of National Economic Council of the Obama White House) and Timothy Geithner (Appointed Treasury Secretary by Obama) are also members of the Group of Thirty (who did that "groundbreaking work" on derivatives) Summers was "a leading advocate of the derivatives deregulation" during the 1990s. (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lawrence_Summers) ... Then there's Robert Rubin, another derivative king, who has also been an Obama economic advisor. But he's been more than that: "The government’s rescue of Citi in 2008 provided a reminder of Rubin’s attempt earlier in the decade to prop up Enron, then a Citi client, by asking a Treasury official to lean on credit rating agencies to maintain a more positive rating than Enron deserved." http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Robert_Rubin (under "Economic record and the 2008 global financial crisis")Looks like we've hired the foxes to guard the henhouse here folks.
* Derivatives are
often compared to betting on a sporting
event. Just imagine what a wonderful development this was for
those in the loop! For you and I, however,
these
instruments are
ticking time bombs. Maybe that’s why
Warren Buffett calls them “financial weapons of mass destruction.” These
instruments are highly complex, unregulated and nearly
impossible (by design) for credit rating agencies to
evaluate, allowing large financial institutions to move debt off their
books and avoid taxes by pooling their debt
with other financial institutions. In a nutshell, smoke and
mirrors paint a pretty picture, and create money outside the normal
central bank liquidity rules. Just another form of "easy
money".