“I came away thinking: interesting guy, not like a major door-opener,” recalled Gary Weinstein, who interviewed him and became his boss. As to what the congressman knew about banking, Mr. Weinstein said, “Zero. It was shocking to me.”
.. Today, as Mr. Kasich’s campaign seems to be gaining some traction in the early primary state of New Hampshire, Democrats — especially here in Ohio — are working hard to remind voters of his Lehman past. When Mr. Kasich vowed to reform Social Security by giving younger Americans “an opportunity to earn money through the strength of our American economy,” the Ohio Democratic Party accused him of trying to hand “Social Security funds over to the same Wall Street banks that caused the Great Recession — and coincidentally turned Kasich into a millionaire.”
Bank of America Stiffs Shareholders
Furious shareholders sued. But they also did something else: Led by the Service Employees International Union and Finger Interests, a Houston hedge fund, shareholders offered a binding resolution at the annual meeting calling for Lewis to step down from his role as board chairman. The idea was that having separate people serve as C.E.O. and chairman would provide additional board oversight.
The resolution narrowly passed. Several participants have since told me that they believe it’s the only example of shareholders passing a binding resolution over a board’s objection.
.. Yet, in October, without informing shareholders, the board decided to remove the provision in its bylaws splitting the roles, and anoint Moynihan chairman as well as C.E.O.
How Wall Street’s Bankers Stayed Out of Jail
The Justice Department reached agreements with other Wall Street banks, among them Citigroup and Bank of America, using a similar playbook: Threaten public disclosure of behavior that looks criminal and then, in exchange for keeping it sealed, extract a huge financial settlement. No one individual, or group of individuals, is held accountable. No predawn raids of Park Avenue apartments are made. No one gets arrested. No one gets publicly shamed.
Hillary Helps a Bank—and Then It Funnels Millions to the Clintons
“A few weeks after Hillary Clinton was sworn in as secretary of state in early 2009, she was summoned to Geneva by her Swiss counterpart to discuss an urgent matter. The Internal Revenue Service was suing UBS AG to get the identities of Americans with secret accounts,” the newspaper reports. “If the case proceeded, Switzerland’s largest bank would face an impossible choice: Violate Swiss secrecy laws by handing over the names, or refuse and face criminal charges in U.S. federal court. Within months, Mrs. Clinton announced a tentative legal settlement—an unusual intervention by the top U.S. diplomat. UBS ultimately turned over information on 4,450 accounts, a fraction of the 52,000 sought by the IRS.”
Then reporters James V. Grimaldi and Rebecca Ballhaus lay out how UBS helped the Clintons. “Total donations by UBS to the Clinton Foundation grew from less than $60,000 through 2008 to a cumulative total of about $600,000 by the end of 2014, according to the foundation and the bank,” they report. “The bank also joined the Clinton Foundation to launch entrepreneurship and inner-city loan programs, through which it lent $32 million. And it paid former president Bill Clinton $1.5 million to participate in a series of question-and-answer sessions with UBS Wealth Management Chief Executive Bob McCann, making UBS his biggest single corporate source of speech income disclosed since he left the White House.”