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Yellen earned millions in speaking fees from Wall St, tech firms (2021)
- mfringel 4y agoNot unrelated: The House of Saud is losing a lot of money on the Credit Suisse rescue/buyout.
- realce 4y ago"Some estimates of the royal family's wealth measure their net worth at $1.4 trillion." A billion isn't worth losing sleep over here.
- whoisthemachine 4y agoBasically the worth of a nation given to one family.
- thinkindie 4y agoconsidering their grip on Saudi Arabia, that's the worth of a nation.
- kelipso 4y agoThat's how monarchies work
- whoisthemachine 4y agoYes, sorry, I know I was stating the obvious. It's rare that we see that wealth publicized and it took me by surprise.
- spaceman_2020 4y agoNothing that Aramco can't make up for in a few weeks. The House of Saud is sitting on the real money printer.
- esotericimpl 4y ago[dead]
- boeingUH60 4y agoOfficially, it's the Saudi National Bank that is getting burned. But, in an absolute monarchy, you might as well say it's Crown Prince MBS because there's no distinction. There's a reason why Forbes does not even rank royals' wealth. It's a futile journey trying to decipher what belongs to the king and what belongs to the state. But, note that the king must spend a lot on social services (free healthcare, free education (both local and foreign) in Saudi Arabia, etc., to please his countrymen, lest they revolt.
- FollowingTheDao 4y agoBig deal. I mean I know I am totally incorruptible by the influence of money so I am sure Yellen is as well. I mean, she has to make a living, right? Right? RIGHT? I mean if we stop her from getting this money what will happen when I become important and want, I mean, need these speaking fees to put food on my table? Do you literally want to starve Yellen's grandchildren???? (Either people do not know I was being sarcastic or I will become very depressed.)
- yeahsure22 4y ago[flagged]
- dfgasdgsd 4y agoI mean these guys are real jerks.
- deleted 4y ago[deleted]
- unyttigfjelltol 4y ago[2021]
- eschulz 4y agoI thought this was common knowledge
- wslh 4y agoI think she is free now to talk everywhere, isn't she?
- koolba 4y agoSo did Hillary Clinton and I’m sure Yellen is just as uninfluenced by them as she was.
- didgetmaster 4y agoAnyone who thinks that people (on either side of the political aisle) are not influenced by big-money payouts, does not understand human nature. Corporations would not offer these kinds of payments in the form of 'speaking fees' if they didn't think it would influence decision makers.
- sbaiddn 4y agoI think he was being facetious. What the OP alleges [1] Hillary did is crooked and corrupted by any reasonable standard, if not illegal; which says more about out laws than or does redeem the corrupt. [1] "alleges" because I don't want to start something. Everyone on the forum knows where they stand on the Clintons.
- wahern 4y ago> Corporations would not offer these kinds of payments in the form of 'speaking fees' if they didn't think it would influence decision makers. You underestimate the prestige value in securing these speaking engagements. To know whether these companies believe that they're buying (or rewarding) regulators, it would be helpful to compare all the speakers they pay. If they're also paying huge fees to Hollywood actors or other celebrities--people who clearly cannot offer quid pro quo--than that augurs in favor of these companies merely buying prestige. From a quick Google Search, Warren Buffet, for example, supposedly charges $100k-$200k for a speaking engagement. (EDIT: I'm dubious that this is factual--looking through results it seems booking agencies might be including well-known personalities in their databases as a sales tactic, even if they have no relationship. In any event, celebrities are expensive, and top regulators and political appointees are celebrities even outside their field.)
- syzarian 4y agoThat many people find this acceptable is disconcerting. We have a revolving door system whereby the top regulator knows they will get a nice payout by the regulated after their days of regulating end. Clinton’s Secretary of Treasury got a very high paying job after his repeal of Glass-Steagall and the Clinton’s themselves were richly rewarded by Wall Street. Therein lies one of the curses of wealth inequality. Humans compare themselves to those who are better off and strive for that level of enrichment. It’s a corrupting state of affairs. Too few people have too much money.
- javajosh 4y agoNo, it's a personal failing. Janet Yellen could have told them to fly a kite.
- aqme28 4y agoWhen the system massively incentivizes personal failures, that is also a failure of a system
- javajosh 4y agoThe system always has and always will massively incentivize personal failures. That's why humans invented the concept of a "good person" -- it describes one who actively swims against the omnipresent tide. It's why people used to speak about "character" in politics. The tacit assumption is that once you're in power you are, by definition, unrestrained by external forces. The only one left who can restrain you is yourself. It would be wise to highlight these talks as examples of profound personal failures, both for the speakers and the participants. All have succumbed to greed and corruption, and have done so in the open. I think we should promote the ideals of self-restraint once again, and expect our public servants to enjoy a comfortable, upper-middle-class life, and no more. The single best thing we can do is to get money out of politics! The bottleneck to getting elected is, right now, money, and that's fundamentally anti-democratic. We should elect people based on their character, their ideas, their vision, their capacity for communication, and not their bank account. They should demonstrate that they value principle over loyalty, basically every time. In such a world Yellen's behavior would stick out like a sore thumb, and that's good.
- tannhauser23 4y agoWhenever I see a politician or regulator arrested for accepting bribes, I think, what an amateur. American elites have perfected the art of the grift: do a turn in government or academy, and then become a ‘thought leader’ or form an NGO and collect speaking fees from Wall Street and foreign powers. Wait for your party to get back in power, do another round in government, rinse and repeat. Even the Presidency and Prime Ministership are just a stage in one’s path towards hedge fund riches.
- boeingUH60 4y agoYou don't even have to wait after leaving office...you can just get a multi-million dollar book deal payout while in office.
- taylodl 4y agoWhat do you propose? Every party involved has the freedom to associate with whomever they want and the right to conduct business with them. If Yellen was doing a lousy job then presumably far fewer people would be willing to pay her a speaker fee. But hey, if people want to pay her to speak then that's their business.
- dtech 4y agoThe problem is it just means money == political power, which purportedly democracies try to not have.
- taylodl 4y agoThe Fed isn't the government and Yellen isn't a politician. Those statements aren't technicalities, they are facts. The Fed was vested by Congress to be the U.S.' banker due to Congress' abysmal history of failure managing money policy. As far as money == political power, start with campaign finance reform. That's the vehicle being used to "buy" politicians.
- starkd 4y agoThe turning point was the Clinton administration. Before that, no former president would dare sully the office by accepting honorarium or speaking fees. At least, not nearly on the scale Clinton took it to.
- mtrycz2 4y agoDetail of fees and organizations [0]. Biggest are (in order): Citadel, Citi, Credit Suisse. [0] https://www.swfinstitute.org/news/83524/janet-yellens-speaking-fees-and-income https://www.swfinstitute.org/news/83524/janet-yellens-speaki...
- throwawaysleep 4y agoThis is years old. She wasn’t doing this while working in gov.
- sbaiddn 4y agoObviously! That would be illegal. The trick is that the people paying the fees know that: - you're well connected - you'll be back in government as soon as the administrations change. Or do you really think Biden (or Trump, or DeSantis, or whoever you want) would have chosen as secretary the bank administrator of Springfield Oklahoma's largest credit union? That would be daft. So the relevant part is that "unemployed" Yellen was "[..] the Federal Reserve chair from 2014 to 2018." When her term ended: "She took in the speaking fees in 2019 and 2020." And, after an arduous two year job search she's a cabinet level secretary regulating those she collected fees from.
- boeingUH60 4y agoOne of the most notable deals I heard about for a politician was Obama getting a $65 million book advance [1] shortly after leaving office. I get that Obama's books sell a lot, but damn, that's huge. It's obvious that once you become a high-ranking politician (especially President, VP, or a similar high-level position), wealth awaits you once you leave office. What's then the incentive to serve the people if you know that you'll make enough money to not give a damn once your tenure is over? 1- https://www.vox.com/culture/2017/3/2/14779892/barack-michelle-obama-65-million-book-deal-penguin-random-house https://www.vox.com/culture/2017/3/2/14779892/barack-michell...
- jefftk 4y agoHow does earning money from selling a book hurt your incentives to do a good job as a politician? It seems to me it makes them better: there's less temptation to take money from industries you were involved in regulating, and your book will sell better if people think you did good work in office.
- starkd 4y agoYou can't possibly be this naive. The people giving them money have access to power. Even a former president has plenty of contacts within the government as well as the public stage. They can be enormously persuasive on issues with the attention they get.
- jefftk 4y agoWhile it's a lot of money it's not out of keeping with the kind of sales they would have expected for his book. In it's first month "A Promised Land" sold 3.3M copies [1] and was the best selling book in the US for 2020! It's not clear to me what sort of "access to power" connections Penguin Random House would be getting out of this, and it's very clear that they got a lot of sales. [1] https://global.penguinrandomhouse.com/announcements/a-promised-land-by-barack-obama-sells-more-than-3-3-million-units-in-u-s-and-canada-in-its-first-month-of-publication/ https://global.penguinrandomhouse.com/announcements/a-promis...
- game_the0ry 4y agoStory time. Citicorp and Travelers group merged in 1998, officially violating Glass-Steagall, which was law at the time. Robert Rubin, former chairman of Goldman Sachs, was Treasury Secretary at the time. Once the repeal was passed 1999, he resigned from treasury and joined Citi the same fuckin year as a consultant and director. Between 1999 and 2009, he made ~$120 million. For more on the influence and corruption of the financial services industry see Inside Job. [1] Policy-makers and politicians can be bought cheaply. They are, and always will be, commodities. That's the lesson here. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Inside_Job_(2010_film) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Inside_Job_(2010_film)
- jongjong 4y ago'Speaking fees' is a euphemism for 'after-office bribe'.
- hgsgm 4y agoafter, before, or between-office bribe. Yellem is in office now and was before.
- m0llusk 4y agoWhat evidence is there that Yellen's policies or speeches were influenced?
- TheCoelacanth 4y agoThere doesn't need to be evidence of actual influence. The mere existence of such an obvious conflict of interest is itself corruption.
- jongjong 4y agoThe huge sums of money she was given to 'speak'; that's the evidence she was influenced.
- throwme_123 4y agoThe US is actually one the most corrupt countries on earth. What makes it worse: They always try to give lessons to the rest of the world, but meh. The result is here: Record homeless Americans, drug addicts in the streets, health crisis, education crisis, while the ruling elite (it's even more hypocritical when it's the left like Yellen) gets even richer. Time for a revolution maybe.
- hgsgm 4y agoYellen is center-right, not left.
- starkd 4y agoNo way. Maybe at one time, but her comments in recent years put her way out of that category.
- syzarian 4y agoThe U.S. has moved so far to the right the last 50 years that it has distorted the electorate's idea of what 'centrist' means. Regan believed the tax on capital ought to the higher than the tax on labor. Bush Sr. supported cap and trade when it came to acid rain. The EPA came about during Nixon's Presidency.
- slaw 4y agoI don't know about the last 50 years, but in the last 15 years U.S. is moving rapidly to the left.
- syzarian 4y agoThe U.S. is not moving rapidly to the left. Your perception is being skewed by how far to the right the U.S. is in comparison to other OECD nations. The Republican party is far more right wing than any other major comparable party in the OECD.
- jefftk 4y agoObama appointed Yellen to be the Federal Reserve chair in 2014. Trump replaced her with Jerome Powell in 2018. Biden appointed her to her current position as Secretary of the Treasury in 2021. This article is from then, about speaking fees in 2019 and 2020 when she was not working in government. It's reasonable to be concerned about how payments from industry before or after holding office might affect decisions while in office, though.
- turbobooster 4y agoCreepy how most here find this ok...
- Eumenes 4y agoThese speaking fees HAVE to be kickbacks, right? I've attended a few of these things before and the talks have almost no substance, and the speakers just regurgitate things they've said before in the press or on official business. These don't equate to an industry leader or SME giving a talk on a technical or vocational subject.
- sbaiddn 4y agoOf course! But they're not technically illegal. So you can charge hundreds of thousands of dollars plus expenses for a one hour talk. They make more per performance than most of the biggest music stars. Consider that the "Friends" stars, at their height, only made $1 million/episode which took far more than ten hours to make and was broadcast and loved by hundreds of millions (if not billions?) around the world. Obviously it's a graft. But! How do you make this illegal within our constitutional framework? A cure must but be worse than the disease.
- varispeed 4y agoJust like charging $10k for a bottle of champagne is not illegal, but it means you don't have to open as many car washes to put the cash through. Just have the dealers book the table and pay cash for the champs. Then just pay tax and money is squeaky clean. Similar story with the speech circuit. Politicians do favours and then once they are out of office they go on a tour to collect payments. Everyone knows what it is, but there is no interest in making this a criminal offence, because every single politician in office wants to cash in once they are out.
- sbaiddn 4y ago"A cure must but be worse than the disease." I meant: "A cure CANNOT be worse than the disease." - autocorrect fail
- beezlebroxxxxxx 4y agoThere definitely is a kickback aspect, but another one is that they are paying these speakers for the cachet of their "presence". If you spend time in and around some of these events (thinktanks, management consulting, and Wall Street, are especially brutal for this) they are really about signaling competence. It's the same reason that they hire fresh undergrads from almost exclusively ivy leagues regardless of that fresh graduate's major -- the "name brand" of the degree is the signaling for competence. Whether the talks are actually of any substance at all is beside the point (and attendants will actually whine if the talk is too technical). Just getting them in the room and sending out the PR blasts is worth it for the longtail influence on the perception of the org.
- lvl102 4y agoIt’s not coincidence that Fed (and SEC) did not get in the way of Wall Street money machine at the height of SPAC and meme mania despite raging inflation. They continued QE even after admitting to inflation pressures that could toil the economy for years to come. Now that Wall Street made all its money they’re going to crush asset prices just so these big fat bankers can scoop up distressed assets on the cheap. And so the cycle begins.
- seydor 4y agopeople are too afraid to change the system in case it collapses (usually younger ones). Older people are the majority and taking advantage of it any way they can, and they are giving free passes to each other. Old wise men/women run the world. This is a weird timeline , a reversal of the '60s
- Mizoguchi 4y agoShocking
- orwin 4y agoThe issue I have with those attacks on Yellen are two-fold : First, as this article show, they come from everywhere (ie she's at the same time a sellout and not listening to the banking industry), and are very sudden. If she was incompetent from the start, it would have been different, but from what I read pre 2023, the main concern for right wing guys is that she was (ordered from likely to be true to less likely): a woman, too partisan, friend to Obama/the Clinton (from breibart) and following the rabbit hole, a pedophile. And regular conservative/liberal outlet had nothing to say about her (I'll pass on the critic from the left as it's a critic of institutions and not of the person). It feel weird and unnatural. Second, even if she is incompetent, caused suffering all over the world as millionaires and billionaires took a haircut, one thing I'm really certain of is that people would rather attack a specific person than what created the position they're in. Or more accurately, point at specifics rather than globals. It feels like operation scapegoat to me tbh.
- yeahsure22 4y ago[flagged]
- boeingUH60 4y agoOn this same thread, I have seen comments about Al Gore, Bill Clinton, Robert Rubin, and Barney Frank. Is it really sexist to complain that a well-known public official gets paid millions of dollars (while out of office for a short period) by the same institutions that she eventually gets to regulate?
- janalsncm 4y ago> Yellen listed firms and banks where she had received speaking fees and said she intended to “seek written authorization” from ethics officials to “participate personally and substantially” in matters involving them What the hell? The speaking fees themselves should have been banned, but she doesn’t have to recuse herself? Any “ethics” official that approved that needs to be fired.
- lekanwang 4y agoI like the Singaporean model of benchmarking high-ranking government salaries to a percent of the pay of top earners in the country (https://www.dollarsandsense.sg/heres-much-singapores-president-cabinet-ministers-paid-salary/ https://www.dollarsandsense.sg/heres-much-singapores-preside..., https://www.psd.gov.sg/docs/default-source/default-document-library/white-paper---salaries-for-a-capable-and-committed-govt.pdf https://www.psd.gov.sg/docs/default-source/default-document-...), and pairing that with very active anticorruption enforcement. MPs get paid over $1M USD under this model, but it incentives are much more aligned under this model.
- kelipso 4y agoWe're talking money in the range of $100 million and upwards that these politicians make within a few years in office. The anti corruption has to be the primary focus because the incentive to make money even with $1M salary is huge.
- mark_l_watson 4y agoIt would never happen, but I wish there were a central web site with accurate information of income sources for all people employed, or once employed, by the federal government. It is fairly well known that high profile people like Bill and Hillary Clinton make a fortune giving talks to Wall Street insiders, etc. I think it is also important to know if lower level bureaucrats start getting lots of money from companies they steered contracts to. This is not a Democrat or Republican problem specifically since politicians on both sides get campaign funding and support from the same sources.
- deleted 4y ago[deleted]
- jones6ofMont 4y agoShe will preside over the Great Recession 2.0 just like Bernanke. Nothing wrong due to her really, she just inherited the mess that never got cleared since Bernanke time. By then she will need a Nobel to match Bernanke.
- varispeed 4y agoOver the top speaking fees is an equivalent of over the top priced alcohol in establishments involved in money laundering. It is only acceptable, because lawmakers don't want to close the door to getting paid for favours.
- come_at_me_bro 4y ago[dead]