Just what were those monthly Bloomberg columns for which Gene Sperling, now an Obama Treasury official, was being paid $137,500 a year (or, to do the math, $11,458.33 a column, or, for an 800-word column, $14.32 a word)? My favorite appears under the headline "Subprime Mortgage Meltdown Renews Urban Blight," and begins, "There is no shortage of regret over the failure of regulators and the Bush administration to heed the warning signs about the extent of the subprime housing crisis." The column next discusses the plight of Lawrence, Massachusetts, once the arson capital of New England, then revitalized by homeownership, now threatened by foreclosure. The column ends "Gene Sperling, formerly President Bill Clinton's top economic adviser, is a Bloomberg News columnist. He is a senior fellow at the Center for American Progress and is advising Hillary Clinton in her bid for the 2008 presidential nomination. The opinions expressed are his own." There's no disclosure whatsoever that Mr. Sperling was earning $887,727 a year for advising Goldman Sachs on its charitable giving, in a year that Goldman was accepting tens of billions of dollars in federal backing. Had there been such disclosure, readers might have wondered why Mr. Sperling was blaming the subprime crisis on "the failure of regulators and the Bush administration," rather than, say, the failures of Goldman Sachs, which, as I note in the long Goldman post, paid $60 million to settle with the Massachusetts state attorney general for its role in the sub-prime mortgage fiasco. The map downloadable from the Massachusetts attorney general shows that many of the loans affected by the Goldman settlement are in, sure enough, Lawrence.
More on Sperling
https://www.futureofcapitalism.com/2009/10/more-on-sperling
by Editor | Related Topics: Banking, Capital Markets Regulation, Goldman Sachs, Housing, Press receive the latest by email: subscribe to the free futureofcapitalism.com mailing list