Stop us if you’ve heard this one before, but megabank Citigroup just may hire a former high-ranking White House official to a high-level position. According to Bloomberg, former budget director Peter Orszag is in advanced talks with Citi for a job at the company’s investment banking division.
Since leaving the White House earlier this year, Orszag has been busying himself with wonky New York Times columns. He also holds a title at the Council on Foreign Relations, doing whatever it is those people do.
Citigroup has something of a special relationship with the government’s assorted economic entities. Until early 2009, Former Treasury Secretary Bob Rubin held a well-paid position at the bank, but his responsibilities remained nebulous. Rubin and Orszag have worked together in the past:
Orszag’s tenure at the Clinton White House overlapped with Citigroup’s former executive-committee chairman, Robert Rubin, who served as Treasury secretary from 1995 to 1999. In 2006, when Rubin, 72, helped to found an economic research group at the Brookings Institution called the Hamilton Project, Orszag was named its first director. Obama, then a senator from Illinois, spoke at the project’s unveiling.
And then of course there’s another tie between the government and the bank: a $45 billion federal bailout of the bank, some of which remains on the taxpayer’s books.
mtaylor [at] observer.com | @mbrookstaylor
