economic adviser

Peter Orszag will become the first member of President Obama’s cabinet to leave:

White House budget director Peter Orszag plans to leave government in July, becoming the first member of President Barack Obama’s Cabinet to depart, administration officials said Monday. Orszag is likely to join a think tank, colleagues said.

Presidential advisers say a possible successor as director of the Office of Management and Budget is Rob Nabors, who was Orszag's deputy and went over to the Chief of Staff’s office to be a senior adviser to Rahm Emanuel. Nabors now he attends the 7:30 a.m. senior staff meeting and insiders say his stock never dropped, but only gained in value.

Two other possible replacements each served as chief economic adviser to President Bill Clinton: Laura D’Andrea Tyson of the University of California at Berkeley, named by Obama as a member of the President’s Economic Recovery Advisory Board; and Gene Sperling, now a counselor to Treasury Secretary Tim Geithner. 

What we really need is a new thinker in there – someone along the lines of a Paul Krugman. Everyone agrees that things like the stimulus was never enough, and the President never pushed for more. He needs advisers that will push him to really get this economy under control.

The employer of Phil Gramm, the very man who championed to get rid of banking regulations and served as an economic adviser to the McCain Campaign, has been busted:

UBS AG, Switzerland’s largest bank, will pay $780 million to avoid U.S. prosecution and settle regulatory claims that it helped thousands of wealthy Americans use Swiss bank accounts to avoid paying taxes.

UBS agreed to resolve claims by the U.S. Justice Department that the bank helped U.S. citizens hide accounts from the Internal Revenue Service, the U.S. government said in statements released today. Prosecutors won’t pursue criminal charges if UBS makes promised reforms while paying $400 million in tax-related payments. The bank must also disgorge $380 million under accords with prosecutors and the Securities and Exchange Commission.

The agreement resolves SEC claims that it acted as an unregistered broker-dealer and investment adviser to thousands of U.S. citizens who held accounts directly or in the names of others. UBS spokesman Mark Arena wasn’t available for comment.

I bet they aren’t too happy at UBS about this. Perhaps Gramm will call them a company of “whiners”.

Here is his own 3am ad:

Pretty interesting coming from a man who's top economic adviser is considered one of the key culprits in the entire subprime mess.

Speaking of Phil Gramm, let's look at his employer:

The spiraling crisis in the credit and housing markets has kept Gramm in focus, fairly or not. His employer, UBS, revealed yesterday that investment losses tied to the U.S. housing market reached $37 billion over the last six months. For the last three months, UBS posted a $12 billion loss.

Gramm, UBS's vice chairman, said yesterday he was "totally unaware" of his bank's massive holdings of securities tied to subprime mortgages, but, he added, "I'm confident we'll recover."

So Gramm was "unaware" of where a majority of the income was generated from, for a company he helped run? For some reason I just can't buy that. Gramm is just like McCain - nothing more than a liar. They will both destroy our economy even more.

Phil Gramm is McCain's chief economic adviser and was one of the chief architects of the deregulation of the banking industry that helped get us into the mortgage crisis. Now George Bush is proposing sweeping new regulations of the banking industry to help prevent more problems. This appears to go strongly against Gramm's beliefs, as well as the neo-con belief of "smaller government" over all. It is going to be interesting to see how the neo-cons respond to this new proposal.