CADWALADER, Wickersham & Taft, the big law firm that was hired earlier this year by the government to advise General Motors and other failing automakers, doesn’t want me to write this next item.
So, naturally, I am.
A spokesman for the firm says everyone already knows that one of its partners, W. Christopher White, is the brother-in-law of Steve Rattner, the former “car czar” who abruptly left his post with the Obama administration under odd circumstances.
Rattner — and this is already widely known — and his company Quadrangle Group (along with a bunch of other investment firms) are apparently being investigated by the Securities & Exchange Commission and New York State Attorney General Andrew Cuomo.
Those probes are looking into allegations of pay-for-play schemes in New York State. If you are not familiar with the term, maybe the old-fashioned word “kickback” will ring a bell.
Anyway, Cadwalader says it’s old news that Rattner married Patricia Maureen White, in June, 1986.
And even if you weren’t invited to the wedding, you surely know that Maureen (as she prefers to be known, along with her maiden last name) is the lil’ sis of Christopher, who is Cadwalader’s chairman and co-chair of the firm’s corporate department.
“If that’s the direction he’s going, tell him it’s been asked and answered several times,” said Chris White through his law firm’s spokesman.
Well, yes, that is my direction.
And an extensive search of Factiva and the Internet couldn’t find a reference to this issue either, although some lawyer-type blogs and publications may have brought it up.
Next issue: Cadwalader, Wickersham & Taft wants you to know that it got the GM job fair and square, before their in-law was appointed all-powerful czar.
Well, that is true — kinda.
As best I can tell, Cadwalader got the auto job on Feb. 6.
Rattner officially got the czar job on Feb 24, although his appointment was being mentioned as a nearly sure thing as early as Jan. 14 in The New York Times and elsewhere.
Maybe Cadwalader got Rattner the czar job rather than Rattner getting the law firm appointed.
Whatever! I thought you might find all this interesting. But if I bored you with stuff you already knew, I apologize and hopefully I’ll make it up to you below.
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The Federal Reserve’s Open Market Committee will meet this Tuesday and Wednesday and it will issue the usual communiqué afterwards — growth picked up some places, not in others, inflation low — blah, blah and blah.
But even though most of the wording will be ordinary, you should pay very close attention to two things.
First, will Fed Chairman Ben Bernanke change the wording on his interest rate intentions?
If Bernanke doesn’t say he plans to keep rates low for an extended period of time, the financial markets could get very bothered.
Longer-term interest rates could go up without the approval of the Fed. And they have been.
But the words Bernanke utters on this matter are still important.
Second, the Fed has supposedly ended one portion of its quantitative easing program — meaning the program under which it was printing money so it could act as its own shill in buying Treasury securities.
It’s still buying mortgage-backed securities in this way, but the ending of quantitative easing will make both the stock and bond markets tense.
Nobody knows why stock prices declined so much last Friday when the Dow fell 249 points.
But the bubble in stocks that started last March is largely being caused by liquidity, not valuation. Translation: It wasn’t that stocks were such a great value.
The bubble inflated because the Fed has been pumping so much money that people had to put it to work.
When the Fed stops printing money that could be a big problem for Wall Street.
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Here’s how the economy is broken, and why.
Yesterday President Obama said the US economy is “back from the brink” But he added that the US must “get serious” about reducing debt.
Problem one: The more the president says that the economy was near the brink, the more he reminds people how scared they should have been. Not good for confidence.
Problem two: Under normal cir cumstances, it’s much too early to talk about reducing the US debt level.
But Washington has to do it because we are borrow ing so much from very ner vous foreigners and that’s causing the value of the US dollar to collapse.
Problem three: it’s hard for President Obama to be a budget cutter when he’s trying to spend a lot of money on health care reform.
Spending on something new just doesn’t seem like reducing spending to most rational adults. john.crudele@nypost.com