Tuesday, March 30, 2010;
A16
GOVERNMENT
Treasury pick not on recess-appointment list
Over the weekend, the Obama administration threatened to circumvent Republicans who are blocking 15 of the president's nominees by appointing them during the Easter recess.
A prominent name not on the list: Lael Brainard, nominee for the Treasury Department's undersecretary for international affairs, one of the highest-ranking posts in the agency.
Her absence from the list, an administration official said, was no accident. Senate Democrats are planning to invoke cloture, which allows the majority party in Congress to overcome procedural hurdles from the minority and force a vote. Cloture requires 60 votes and takes several days to implement.
Such a procedure would put Brainard permanently in her position. The recess appointments, by contrast, would expire in January 2011.
-- David Cho
LEGAL
Guilty plea in IBM insider-trading case
A former senior executive at IBM pleaded guilty Monday to federal charges in what prosecutors call the largest insider-trading case in the history of hedge funds.
Robert Moffat, 53, pleaded guilty to conspiracy to commit securities fraud and securities fraud, charges that carry a potential penalty of 25 years in prison. He admitted to providing inside information in 2008 to a friend who worked at a hedge fund.
Moffat, once considered a candidate for chief executive at IBM, was considered the highest-level executive in a case that resulted in 21 arrests. His lawyers said he was not cooperating with the government's probe.
-- Associated Press
ALSO IN BUSINESS
-- Geithner says commercial real estate losses are manageable: Mounting losses from commercial real estate loans will continue to be a problem for the United States and especially smaller banks, but it can be managed, Treasury Secretary Timothy F. Geithner said.
"Commercial real estate's still going to be a problem for the country," Geithner said in an interview with CNBC. "But we can manage through this process."
Geithner also said the financial system "is in a much, much stronger position today" than it was three years ago in the run-up to the financial crisis and that the U.S. economy has recovered from the crisis faster than those of other countries. Major U.S. financial institutions have far stronger capital positions than they did three years ago, though many of them still face daunting challenges, he said.
-- Associated Press
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