Round Up the Usual Suspects

What a surprise. The Trump administration official running the bailout is directing aid to his family's business:

Federal Reserve Chairman Jerome Powell and Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin have become the public faces of the $3 trillion federal coronavirus bailout. Behind the scenes, however, the Treasury’s responsibilities have fallen largely to the 42-year-old deputy secretary, Justin Muzinich.

A major beneficiary of that bailout so far: Muzinich & Co., the asset manager founded by his father where Justin served as president before joining the administration. He reported owning a stake worth at least $60 million when he entered government in 2017.

Today, Muzinich retains financial ties to the firm through an opaque transaction in which he transferred his shares in the privately held company to his father. Ethics experts say the arrangement is troubling because his father received the shares for no money up front, and it appears possible that Muzinich can simply get his stake back after leaving government.

Corruption in the Treasury Department is nothing new.

Timothy Geithner got a VERY comfortable sinecure (I use this word a lot) as a back-end payoff for his "foaming the runway" for banks on the backs of homeowners.

Still, this does seem to be a bit brazen.