Kendrick R. Wilson III is a man with friends in high places.
Beyond that, his resume includes graduation from Dartmouth College and Harvard Business School, plus work at Goldman Sachs.
These days, that makes him an ideal candidate for a high post at the Treasury Department, so it’s no surprise he has signed on to help Washington ride out the current fiscal storm.
Last week one of Wilson’s friends, President George W. Bush, called him with a job offer he couldn’t refuse.
“Kenny, your country needs you,” Bush told Wilson, according to The Wall Street Journal. The president and Wilson are on a first-name basis, as they were students together at Harvard Business.
Bush asked Wilson to come to Washington to serve as an adviser to Treasury Secretary Henry Paulson.
Wilson will help Paulson sort out the crisis in the banking sectors, functioning as “the informal savior-in-chief of the American Financial system,” according to Heidi Moore in a Journal blog.
Paulson and Wilson bring to their duties a doubly close connection.
They have known each other since their time together at Dartmouth.
And they are colleagues from Goldman. Paulson, the former CEO of Goldman, brought Wilson to the firm in 1998.
Goldman is golden right now, as the firm has come out of the mortgage and credit crisis relatively unscathed.
In getting Wilson, Bush and Paulson are essentially swapping one Goldman alum for another.
Wilson fills a void left by the departure of Undersecretary Robert K. Steel, a former Goldman executive who left Treasury this month to take over Wachovia Bank.
The head of Goldman’s financial-institutions group, Wilson, 61, has advised several firms on how to weather the storm in the markets. He’ll take a leave to advise Paulson at Treasury through January.
“Anyone who knows anybody in financial services knows Ken Wilson,” Gary Crittenden, the chief financial officer of Citigroup Inc., told the Journal.
Wilson came to Goldman from Lazard, Freres and Co., where he was head of investment banking.
Before that he was president of Ranieri & Co., a firm established by Lewis S. Ranieri, the mortgage securities banker.
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1 Comments
#1. Andrew Barile 10.19.2008
Where do I send my CV to be considered a Fed appointed Trustee for AIG?
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