Well, sort of.<\/p>\n
He won’t be an Undersecretary of the Treasury, but he will be an adviser to the Treasury.<\/p>\n
So, he will still be there, albeit without a budget or staff who report to him.<\/p>\n
I suppose that this is as good as can be expected.<\/p>\n
Over at Credit Slips<\/i>, Adam Levitin, has a a very interesting perspective on the reactions to this development<\/a>:<\/p>\n There’ve been a bunch of post-mortems of the Antonio Weiss nomination in the press the last few days (see, e.g., here<\/a>, here<\/a>, and here<\/a>). When I read them I often feel like I’m reading a story about a kid who went to a fancy eastern boarding school, where he was head of the literary society, lettered in three sports, and did lots of charity work, but didn’t get into the Ivy League school where all of his family and family friends went. The result: shock and outrage that the kid was denied his birthright!<\/span><\/p>\n Being nominated for Undersecretary of the Treasury isn’t quite like getting into Harvard (or even Yale). Yet reading Weiss’s defenders’ (and their all-too-willing journalist abetters), one would think that’s the story. And that underscores precisely what the problem was with the Weiss nomination, and what Weiss’s defenders just don’t get (or want to admit they get): the assumption that Wall Street success entitles someone to an important policy position for which they have no apparent qualifications<\/span><\/b>.<\/span><\/p>\n The problem with Antonio Weiss was never that he worked on Wall Street. It was that working on Wall Street was his only<\/i> qualification (besides giving lots of political donations). \u2026\u2026\u2026 The problem was that Weiss’s Wall Street pedigree was that was touted as his only<\/i> qualification (unless one counts bankrolling a little-read literary magazine), as if it should be self-evident that anyone C-suite type from Wall Street is qualified for any job at Treasury. \u2026\u2026\u2026<\/span><\/p>\n