Will Jack Lew succeed at Treasury?

The policy wonk is likely to become the president's point man on tax, spending, and entitlement negotiations. Not everyone is happy about that

Jack Lew
(Image credit: Roger L. Wollenberg/Getty Images)

Jack Lew's nomination as the new Treasury secretary does "not bode well for either the business community or, ironically, the White House," said Steve Liesman at CNBC. The White House chief of staff has previously run the Office of Management and Budget twice, under both Clinton and Obama. But that's not the kind of experience to convince business executives that he has "an allegiance to something other than the White House and its political ambitions." Obama has a real problem with Wall Street, and the current Treasury secretary, Timothy Geithner, has the expertise "to bridge the gap." Lew does not. "Obama may have missed an opportunity to add a voice with market credibility to his team."

Lew may be no Geithner, said Robert Scheer in The Nation. But for anyone who wants to see curbs on Wall Street's unfettered greed, that's "scant cause for cheer." When he worked at Citigroup, from 2006 to 2008, Lew ended up overseeing an alternative investment unit that contributed to the bank's failure and set the stage for its $45 billion taxpayer bailout. In 2008 alone, he was "raking in more than $2 million in salary and bonuses." And at his last confirmation hearing, in 2010, Lew discounted the importance of regulation, revealing a "myopic view of the origins of the economic meltdown." That might matter more now than it once did, said Matthew Zeitlin at The Daily Beast. The Dodd-Frank legislation makes the Treasury secretary one of the nation's most important financial regulators. "And Lew doesn't have much regulatory experience."

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