Neel Kashkari

A 35-year old Indian-American whiz, whose parents migrated to the US from Jammu and Kashmir, is being entrusted with the task of rescuing Wall Street, the US economy and pretty much the entire financial world tied to its coat tails from a tailspin.US treasury secretary Henry Paulson will name Neel Kashkari, currently the assistant secretary for international affairs in the department of treasury, as the interim head for its new office of financial stability to oversee the $700-billion bailout programme aimed at arresting the US economy’s precipitous slide arising from the mortgage crisis.Kashkari is one of nearly half a dozen Indian-Americans, including Louisiana Governor Bobby Jindal, who have served in the George W Bush administration at Tier Two cabinet levels. But the new job clearly puts Kashkari in a different league altogether. A long-time understudy and associate of Paulson going back to their days at Goldman Sachs, Kashkari was nominated as assistant secretary and confirmed by the Senate only in July in a little-noticed development at that time because it came at the tail-end of the Bush administration’s eight-year run in office.But the monumental crisis that has spooked Wall Street and the associated world has thrown the young Indian-American engineer-turned-financial expert into the spotlight. On Monday, the financial world and blogosphere was agog with the news of such a young man being tasked with such a huge task on a day the market continued its downward spiral.“It seems a curious time to appoint a young acolyte from ‘The Firm’ (Goldman Sachs) to run one of the most critical financial rescue programmes in US history,” Financial Times blog Alphaville observed, noting Kashkari’s substantial science background. Financial Times blog Alphaville observed: “There is a small matter of experience. He is 35 years old and — if appointed and confirmed — will, as the Wall Street Journal points out, gain a ‘position of substantial power’ overseeing Treasury’s effort to buy the financial industry’s bad loans and other distressed securities.” On a day the Dow tanked 300 points an hour after opening and went below 10,000, a wiseacre on Market Ticker forum wrote, “Seriously? The guy overseeing the $700 billion is named ‘CashCarry’? You really can’t make this stuff up...” The last time the Dow was below 10,000 was 1999. Kashkari has a bachelor’s degree in engineering from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign (birthplace of the original Internet browser Mosaic) and went to earn a master’s degree in aerospace engineering to initially take up a career in sciences. He worked as the R&D Principal Investigator at the company TRW in Redondo Beach, California, where he developed technology for NASA space science missions such as James Webb Space Telescope, the replacement for Hubble, which is scheduled for launch in 2013. But apparently, the call, or lure, of the finance world was so strong that he enrolled for an MBA at Wharton School of the University of Pennsylvania, graduating in 1997. He then joined Goldman-Sachs Goldman Sachs in San Francisco, where he led the firm’s IT security investment banking practice, advising public and private companies on mergers and acquisitions and financial transactions, before moving to New York where he worked closely with then chairman and CEO Henry Paulson, who would go on to become Treasury Secretary. Paulson immediately drafted Kashkari as his senior advisor before he was appointed Assistant Secretary in July this this year. Neel was born in Akron, Ohio to Chaman and Sheila Kashkari, Indian immigrants originally from J&K, who like thousands of Indian immigrants took the academic route to the United States. Chaman Kashkari, who taught at the University of Akron, is now a retired professor of engineering and Sheila Kashkari is a pathologist. Neel’s wife Minal works for defense contractor Lockheed Martin. The couple has been active in Republican circles with political contributions to the party.Kashkari is now the second Indian in the heart of the US and the world financial crisis.