This post was archived from createpositivechange.org/. View the original on the Wayback Machine.
Author: muckety
-
Silver State Bank Fails John Mccains Son Had Been Director
This post was archived from createpositivechange.org/. View the original on the Wayback Machine.
-
H. Rodgin Cohen at epicenter of Fannie Mae-Freddie Mac crisis
H. Rodgin Cohen may not be well known away from Wall Street, but he would seem to be the first person called in times of bank failure, acquisitions or mergers.
Consequently, it’s no surprise that Cohen, the chairman of Sullivan & Cromwell, a powerhouse law firm, took part in the recent talks between the U.S. Department of the Treasury and mortgage giants Freddie Mac and Fannie Mae.
Hint: Click in map to explore connectionsStory continues below interactive map
Click to activate the interactive map (requires Java)MAP HINTS: Click expands a name. Control+Click centers map on a name. Solid lines are current relations. Dotted lines are former relations. For advanced tools choose Tools > Options from the menu at top. More help. Not seeing the maps? Please go here to check for the latest version of Java.Cohen represented Fannie Mae and Daniel H. Mudd, its CEO, when he met last week with Treasury Secretary Henry Paulson. Ben Bernanke, the Federal Reserve chairman, also attended.
On Sunday, Paulson announced the government takeover of both Freddie Mac and Fannie Mae.
Both companies have been hard hit by a wave of mortgage foreclosures, and the government is going to send much-needed capital their way.
As part of the deal, Mudd and Richard F. Syron, his counterpart at Freddie Mac, leave their posts, though they will remain for a while as advisers. Herbert M. Allison Jr., the former chairman of TIAA-CREF, will replace Mudd. David M. Moffett, a senior adviser with the Carlyle Group and a former vice chairman of US Bancorp, takes over for Syron at Freddie Mac.
Cohen, a native of West Virginia, came to this crisis with more than three decades of experience in high-stakes financial showdowns.
A graduate of Harvard Law School and a veteran of the U.S. Army, he joined Sullivan & Cromwell in 1970 and became a partner in 1977.
Over the years, Cohen’s efforts have “fundamentally altered the banking landscape,” according to CFO Magazine.
He helped do this in part by discovering a legal loophole that allowed banks to expand beyond state lines and thereby change the industry.
Cohen has also been involved in a steady stream of bank acquisitions, including the joining of Chase Manhattan and Chemical Bank and the merger of Norwest and Wells Fargo.
Cohen has likewise been a key player in rescue efforts involving failed banks.
He helped in the aftermath of the 1974 collapse of Franklin National Bank, and he represented the struggling Continental Illinois Bank in its 1984 negotiations with the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation.
Recently, Cohen was a key player in the talks that led to the fire-sale acquisition of Bear Stearns Companies by JP Morgan Chase & Co.
Cohen was also involved in the resolution of the 1980 Iran hostage crisis, helping obtain through the release of frozen Iran bank deposits the money that was necessary to free the hostages.
“When the phone call came saying the hostages had landed, it was the most exhilarating feeling I’ve experienced,” he later told The New York Times.
Cohen reportedly has a less-is-more style that works well at the conference table.
“He has a quiet sense of authority in a boardroom,” Hamid Biglari of Citigroup told The Financial Times. “He speaks infrequently. He is not one to dominate a conversation by holding forth. But when he does speak, everyone listens very carefully.”
-
Silver State bank fails; John McCain’s son had been director
It looks like Andrew McCain got out just in the nick of time.
McCain 46, the son of GOP presidential nominee John McCain, resigned as a director of troubled Silver State Bank and its parent company, Silver State Bancorp, on July 26, citing “personal reasons” – just five weeks before regulators shut down the federally-insured bank.
Regulators announced Friday that they had seized the Nevada bank and sold it, blaming its failure on soured loans in commercial real estate and land development, mainly in Los Vegas.
Hint: Click in map to explore connectionsStory continues below interactive map
Click to activate the interactive map (requires Java)MAP HINTS: Click expands a name. Control+Click centers map on a name. Solid lines are current relations. Dotted lines are former relations. For advanced tools choose Tools > Options from the menu at top. More help. Not seeing the maps? Please go here to check for the latest version of Java.Andrew McCain had served on the company’s three-person auditing committee since joining the board in February, 2008, but there is no indication he committed any wrongdoing, or that his father had any knowledge or involvement in the bank’s difficulties
Still, his involvement in a failed bank is politically awkward for his father’s campaign since it conjures memories of John McCain’s role in the 1980s savings and loan scandals when he was accused of improperly aiding Charles H. Keating, Jr., chairman of the failed Lincoln Savings and Loan Association.
After a lengthy investigation, the Senate Ethics Committee cleared John McCain of impropriety, but chastised him for exercising poor judgment in helping Keating. Three other senators – Alan Cranston, Dennis DeConcini, and Donald Riegle – were found to have improperly interfered with a federal investigation.
In Andrew McCain’s case, he had been appointed to the boards of Silver State and its holding company in February, and resigned five months later. Silver State issued a July 26 press release announcing his immediate resignation for “personal reasons.”
Only a week afterward, the company announced a $62.7 million net loss for the second quarter of the year – along with the resignations of its CEO and chairman, Corey Johnson and Bryan Norby, both of whom had co-founded the bank in 1996.
The bank said in a subsequent regulatory filing that its second-quarter net loss was actually more than $10 million higher than what it had originally announced. It also said in the filing that its worsening financial condition meant there is “uncertainty about the company’s ability to continue as a going concern.”
The holding company has 13 bank branches in Southern Nevada and four around Phoenix.
Silver State had $1.7 billion in deposits, according to the Las Vegas Review-Journal. Nevada State Bank is taking over the deposits insured by the Federal Deposit Insurance Corp., leaving $20 million in uninsured deposits, which may not be wholly recovered. Silver State became the 11th federally insured bank to fail in 2008.
A Wall Street Journal story looking into Andrew McCain’s sudden exit suggested he had resigned at the urging of those who felt his position on the board could become a liability in his father’s presidential bid. The younger McCain, who is CFO of Phoenix-based Hensley & Co., the distributorship owned by his stepmother Cindy McCain, had also recently agreed to lead the Greater Phoenix Chamber of Commerce, and had concerns about balancing his responsibilities, according to the Journal .
In any case, he was not the first to leave the beleaguered bank.
Douglas French, then the executive vice president of commercial real estate lending, had resigned in May, also citing personal reasons. French is an associate editor of the conservative Liberty Watch magazine, which counts Bill O’Reilly and John Stossel among its contributing writers.
The younger McCain, who is one of two sons from his father’s first marriage, had previously served as a director of Choice Bank in Scottsdale, Arizona, from 2006 to April 1, 2008, when it was acquired by Silver State Bancorp
Click here to sign up for the Muckety Newsletter
-
Hunter Biden is Mucketys Top Search This Week
This post was archived from createpositivechange.org/. View the original on the Wayback Machine.
-
Hunter Biden is Muckety’s top search this week
Hunter Biden, Edra Blixseth, Konrad Ng and Andrew McCain topped the list of most-searched names on Muckety for the week of Aug. 28 through Sept. 3.
Hunter Biden
Topping the list was Hunter Biden, the 38-year-old son of Democratic vice presidential nominee Joe Biden. Hunter Biden was in the news last week after Barack Obama announced his VP pick and reporters began doing their own vetting of the Biden family.
The younger Biden was a consultant with MBNA from 2001 to 2005, while the banking giant was lobbying his father to help the credit card industry win passage of a law making it harder for consumers to file for bankruptcy protection.
Hint: Click in map to explore connectionsStory continues below interactive map
Click to activate the interactive map (requires Java)MAP HINTS: Click expands a name. Control+Click centers map on a name. Solid lines are current relations. Dotted lines are former relations. For advanced tools choose Tools > Options from the menu at top. More help. Not seeing the maps? Please go here to check for the latest version of Java.Edra Blixseth
No. 2 was Edra Blixseth, who was the subject of a profile by Bloomberg’s Anthony Effinger after she settled a 19-month-long divorce fight with ex-husband Tim. This is a snippet from the Bloomberg report:
Edra lives in a 30,000-square-foot (2,800-square- meter) mansion on an estate near Palm Springs, California, called Porcupine Creek. The house, complete with servants, is surrounded by a private golf course.
Porcupine Creek, a Gulfstream II, a 2004 Rolls-Royce Phantom and a BMW 760 are some of the spoils of Edra’s July divorce from Tim. After a 19-month-long fight, she also got control of one big source of their wealth: a private Montana ski- and golf resort called the Yellowstone Club, where the likes of Microsoft Corp. founder Bill Gates, News Corp. President Peter Chernin and hotelier Barry Sternlicht have erected supersized chalets on lots that until the real estate crash sold for $2 million and more.
Konrad Ng
Konrad Ng, the husband of Barack Obama’s half-sister, was the third most-searched name on Muckety, after his wife, Maya Soetoro-Ng, spoke at the Democratic National Convention.
Here are a few nuggets about Obama’s half sister from MSNBC’s profiles of convention speakers:
- Soetoro-Ng, 36, cites Obama as a father figure, as her parents divorced when she was just 9.
- She holds a Ph.D. in comparative education from the University of Hawaii.
- She teaches 9th-grade world cultures and 11th-grade U.S. history and the U.S. Constitution at an all-girls school in Honolulu.
- She and Ng, a Chinese-Canadian, have one daughter, Suhaila, who was 2 in September 2007.
- One of the four bumper stickers on her car reads, “1-20-09. End of an Error.” Another is a “Women for Obama” sticker.
- She recalled their mother would wake them up in the middle of the night to look at the moon.
Andrew McCain
Andrew McCain, one of John McCain’s two sons from his first marriage to Carol McCain, came under scrutiny after resigning as a director of Silver State Bancorp in late July, just days before the Nevada-based company announced it might be on the brink of failure. Andrew McCain is also the CFO of Hensley & Co., the Arizona beer distributor where his stepmother, Cindy McCain, is chair of the board.
Rounding out the top 10 were:
Arthur Culvahouse, Jr.
Arthur Culvahouse, Jr., who is the chairman of the law firm O’Melveny & Myers and the head of the GOP vice-presidential search team for John McCain. With McCain’s surprise pick of Alaska Gov. Sarah Palin and the questions surrounding the depth of her vetting, Culvahouse ended up being vetted himself.
Anne Korin
Anne Korin, an analyst with the Institute for the Analysis of Global Security, who got a lot of attention for her August speech before the National Conservative Student Conference. More about Anne Korin…
Ashley Biden
Ashley Biden, the daughter of Sen. Joe Biden, who was not so much in the news, but in the search results as the curious sought to learn more about the family of the Democratic vice presidential nominee. More about Ashley Biden from Mahalo.
Susan Mikula
Susan Mikula, who was caught in the spotlight when her partner, political analyst Rachael Maddow, sat in for the vacationing Keith Olbermann of MSNBC, and was then given her own show, at the expense of Dan Abrams.
Neilia Hunter Biden
More Biden family vetting here as people sought to find out more about Joe Biden’s first wife, who was killed in a car accident in 1972. One of Biden’s daughter’s was also killed in the crash. More here…
Scott Bommer
Scott Bommer, who was in the news after he sold his co-op at 1060 Fifth Avenue for $48.9 million. Bommer bought the co-op in January for $46 million, setting a record at the time. The New York Observer has an article on the sale.
-
Mccains Campaign for Change is Fueled by Same Old Money Machine
This post was archived from createpositivechange.org/. View the original on the Wayback Machine.
-
Muckety This Cindy Hensley Mccain to the Late Don Bolles
This post was archived from createpositivechange.org/. View the original on the Wayback Machine.
-
Gop Donor Robert Wood Johnson Gets Royal Reception at Convention
This post was archived from createpositivechange.org/. View the original on the Wayback Machine.
-
McCain’s campaign for change is fueled by same old money machine
In accepting the GOP nomination for president last night, John McCain pledged to run as an iconoclast who will shake things up in Washington.
His reputation as a maverick and his selection of Alaska Gov. Sarah Palin as a running mate would signal that McCain is bringing change to the Republican Party.
Hint: Click in map to explore connectionsStory continues below interactive map
Click to activate the interactive map (requires Java)MAP HINTS: Click expands a name. Control+Click centers map on a name. Solid lines are current relations. Dotted lines are former relations. For advanced tools choose Tools > Options from the menu at top. More help. Not seeing the maps? Please go here to check for the latest version of Java.But his campaign money machine sends a different message.
As they say in Casablanca, “Round up the usual suspects.”
The map above shows McCain bundlers who were also major supporters of George W. Bush in 2004. Because individual contributions are capped at $2,300 for the general election, bundlers – influential people who persuade friends, family and colleagues to contribute to a campaign – play a major role in presidential politics.
August A. Busch IIIRobert A. Mosbacher, former Commerce secretary and a friend of George H.W. Bush, is a bundler as well as general chairman of the campaign.
Other heavy hitters include:
- August A. Busch III of Anheuser-Busch
- Henry R. Kravis of Kohlberg, Kravis, Roberts and Co.
- Robert Wood Johnson IV of Johnson Co.
- William H. Strong of Morgan Stanley
- Judy A. Black, whose husband Charles has advised Ronald Reagan, George H.W. Bush, Jesse Helms and Bob Dole
The McCain campaign has released a list of bundlers who have raised $50,000 or more. Of the 450 names listed, 63 have raised at least $500,000.
Related story: GOP donor Robert Wood Johnson gets royal reception at convention