Yellen earned millions in speaking fees from Wall St, tech firms (2021) | Hacker News Reader

Yellen earned millions in speaking fees from Wall St, tech firms (2021)

aljazeera.com

103 pointscsomar122 comments

That many people find this acceptable is disconcerting. We have a revolving door system whereby the top regulator knows they will get a nice payout by the regulated after their days of regulating end. Clinton’s Secretary of Treasury got a very high paying job after his repeal of Glass-Steagall and the Clinton’s themselves were richly rewarded by Wall Street.

Therein lies one of the curses of wealth inequality. Humans compare themselves to those who are better off and strive for that level of enrichment. It’s a corrupting state of affairs. Too few people have too much money.

No, it's a personal failing. Janet Yellen could have told them to fly a kite.

When the system massively incentivizes personal failures, that is also a failure of a system

The system always has and always will massively incentivize personal failures. That's why humans invented the concept of a "good person" -- it describes one who actively swims against the omnipresent tide. It's why people used to speak about "character" in politics. The tacit assumption is that once you're in power you are, by definition, unrestrained by external forces. The only one left who can restrain you is yourself.

It would be wise to highlight these talks as examples of profound personal failures, both for the speakers and the participants. All have succumbed to greed and corruption, and have done so in the open. I think we should promote the ideals of self-restraint once again, and expect our public servants to enjoy a comfortable, upper-middle-class life, and no more.

The single best thing we can do is to get money out of politics! The bottleneck to getting elected is, right now, money, and that's fundamentally anti-democratic. We should elect people based on their character, their ideas, their vision, their capacity for communication, and not their bank account. They should demonstrate that they value principle over loyalty, basically every time. In such a world Yellen's behavior would stick out like a sore thumb, and that's good.

> The tacit assumption is that once you're in power you are, by definition, unrestrained by external forces. The only one left who can restrain you is yourself.

I don’t understand. This is not some truth of all justice systems. It isn’t the case even in the US, except for a few limited cases.

There are a lot of parts of our system that incentivize being a good person, so I don’t know what you’re on about here.

>There are a lot of parts of our system that incentivize being a good person, so I don’t know what you’re on about here.

I'm sorry, which is the system that keeps people good? Tripartite government with separation of powers? A constitution? Tell me: what are the rules can withstand a group of bad faith players? Any system can be undermined by bad actors, on both short (personal) and long (institutional) timescales, and there is always built in incentive to do so. To wit: bribes are great for both sides if you don't get caught. Bribes given in this way may feel and appear to be like capitalism. But the iron minds who spend these enormous sums for brief appearances of past and future judges, bureaucrats and princes, do not do so out of sentiment. Nor, I think, would they bother to argue that it is so.

To claw our way back to the good Nash equilibrium we must open our eyes why the bad Nash equilibrium beckons to us all. Look around the world and see those nations that dwell, apparently permanently, in the bad equilibrium. Where everyone is backstabbing each other, demanding bribes, and so on. The rules forbid it, but they are helpless, just ink on paper. Once cheating starts, an avalanche soon follows.

We have laws and a justice system that disincentivizes bad behavior. The existence of holes in that system does not mean that an effective system is impossible. Plenty of bad person stuff is illegal and punishable.

It should be illegal (and enforceable) for regulators to be so cozy with industry. It feels like you're suggesting we just throw our hands up and say "better things aren't possible."

I don't understand this take.

What if Yellen's intention was to get a nice payout? What if, instead of a good actor making a bad choice you simply have a bad actor that is engineering their way into positions that would later benefit them through book deals?

If you can elaborate on what "get money out of politics" means and how it can prevent book deals after the fact, I'm genuinely curious.

I think building a more robust system that doesn't put the onus solely on actors within the system to be good and can be self-correcting and actually address the revolving door issue instead of just telling people to vote for good policy makers.

Good systems make bad things hard/impossible.

If she doesn’t do it they will kick her out and just get the next person in line who could be “approachable”.

Yes. It is also a systemic failure. Wealth inequality tempts too many people in the penumbra of human morality that lies between those who are saints and those who are evil.

It's a systemic failure because the public has lost clarity of thought and have forgotten entirely the importance of character in general, and self-restraint in particular, in leadership. A problem I think can be causally linked to Citizens United. Ironic that you can't get people to focus on fixing CU because CU engendered an environment that makes it hard to focus.

That is all true. But who wants to be a politician when they are public figures that are beaten, accused, humiliated by opponents, the public, and everyone really. You cannot do it right and most people will probably hate you, regardless of what you do. It's not a pleasant job. Unless you get money for all of this unpleasantness. And then, some entities have more money to give than others (you said that in your last sentence). So this attracts exactly those people to be politicians that you might not want to be politicians. Of course, some are better than others (so do go vote for the right ones), but they all need a certain trait for this job.

So how to break this unfortunate dependency? Give the 'right' entities comparably enough money to pay politicians? But how? Like climate vs. oil. OK, that's cheap, but anyway. You cannot expect the system to work with less money flow, I think.

So how to change this?

We’ve know for decades - take money out of politics and make it about civil service. To do so requires campaign finance reform (limits on spending and sources of $) as well as making lobbying illegal

People like you are exactly the reason why we can't have competent politicians. Who apart from crazy ideologues, the crooked and those that can't hack it as anything else than demagogues do you expect to sign up for a job where you are a public punching ball on terrible pay and with limited ability to diverge from whatever party line or other contingencies dictate?

Can you explain why? Obviously the current system isn’t producing competent ones either.

Sorry, I edited my comment to add some context. It seems very likely to me that if we could increase pay of politicians by a factor of 10 (say), we'd get much much better performance at lower effective cost than we already pay for the soft corruption of "speaking fees" and suchlike.

Unfortunately that seems to be politically infeasible (not even competent autocratic regimes can get away with paying themselves above board).

Well, I'm for campaign finance but not money out of politics.

The president should be getting like 400M/yr instead of 400k/yr. But also paying for their own trips/security/housing/etc and if it turns out 400M/yr isn't enough for that then it should be a higher number.

The fact that the "execs" of congress get paid so little in salary but make it out from outside employment (or by having the government itself pay for it) hampers the rest of the government since it limits what they can pay for every other role in government. Using your ability to run the country efficiently should be a highly paying job so it causes people to actually want to do it.

This is a capitalistic society, you want to have somebody that can estimate a project accurately? You'll need to pay.

Pay so well for the role and have a sufficient pension such that you are forbidden from receiving any kind of further compensation even when you are no longer in the role (or in kind gift or direct charitable contributions). Honestly, US congress people should be paid in the high hundreds of thousands for the work they do and the control they have over the world’s largest economy. It’s kind of ridiculous how low information voters think it’s ok to punish politicians for increasing salaries but ignore the actual budget and what we spend money on because that’s complicated.

Think of it another way. Is there any other CEO or even senior director that couldn’t afford to live near their HQ? And yet, that’s true if you’re a congressperson that’s not independently wealthy. Said another way, we’re unhappy paying politician’s money from the government directly but then complain that all the politician’s are the super wealthy or find alternate income streams? This is very intentional by the way - it’s very convenient for the wealthy in the US to have a political class that is either filled with direct peers or protects them because that’s where the real money comes from even if it’s net parasitic to the US as a whole.

Be Bernie Sanders, apparently.

The bar is pretty low. Don't be an obvious crook or treat yourself like you're in a different class and flout it. Don't vote party lines if it doesn't reflect your constituency, and encourage grassroots involvement and policy voting.

Identity politics drove people off the deep end, because if you disliked Clinton's track record of neoliberal politics, her flagrant corruption and disdain for the working class, and penchant for globalism, then you failed the loyalty test and could be freely ostracized as a secret bigot or false flag operator.

That should have been quashed hard by journalists, but the media lined up, and then Big Tech started putting their fingers on the scales, and we were all left worse off for it.

Trust is earned over a lifetime of accountability and consistency, but that's harder than taking payouts from special interests and voting how your party wants. As they say, eagles may soar, but weasels don't get sucked into jet engines.

I have no idea why you were downvoted for this comment. The change, in my opinion ought to include a cap on wealth and enough pay for politicians that they can govern while living in a very comfortable lifestyle. Present day pay ought to be sufficiently high that all but the very greedy don't look longingly for a payout in the future.

It's not so much that people find it discerning, is that there are only two parties in America. Because one person brings up that she made millions, means that another person will defend her because of their political ideology and party choice.

Bad behavior of politicians on both sides of the aisle should be deployed, but one person's corrupt politician is another persons freedom fighter.

Yes, the disconcerting thing is really the inability of too many voters to be consistent in their beliefs/views. Defense of "my" candidate takes precedence over applying, in a consistent way, one's moral beliefs. We have people who decry Trump's sexual deviancy whilst defending Bill Clinton's. Vice versa.

Story time.

Citicorp and Travelers group merged in 1998, officially violating Glass-Steagall, which was law at the time. Robert Rubin, former chairman of Goldman Sachs, was Treasury Secretary at the time. Once the repeal was passed 1999, he resigned from treasury and joined Citi the same fuckin year as a consultant and director. Between 1999 and 2009, he made ~$120 million.

For more on the influence and corruption of the financial services industry see Inside Job. [1]

Policy-makers and politicians can be bought cheaply. They are, and always will be, commodities.

That's the lesson here.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Inside_Job_(2010_film)

Whenever I see a politician or regulator arrested for accepting bribes, I think, what an amateur. American elites have perfected the art of the grift: do a turn in government or academy, and then become a ‘thought leader’ or form an NGO and collect speaking fees from Wall Street and foreign powers. Wait for your party to get back in power, do another round in government, rinse and repeat. Even the Presidency and Prime Ministership are just a stage in one’s path towards hedge fund riches.

You don't even have to wait after leaving office...you can just get a multi-million dollar book deal payout while in office.

What do you propose? Every party involved has the freedom to associate with whomever they want and the right to conduct business with them. If Yellen was doing a lousy job then presumably far fewer people would be willing to pay her a speaker fee. But hey, if people want to pay her to speak then that's their business.

The problem is it just means money == political power, which purportedly democracies try to not have.

The Fed isn't the government and Yellen isn't a politician. Those statements aren't technicalities, they are facts. The Fed was vested by Congress to be the U.S.' banker due to Congress' abysmal history of failure managing money policy.

As far as money == political power, start with campaign finance reform. That's the vehicle being used to "buy" politicians.

The turning point was the Clinton administration. Before that, no former president would dare sully the office by accepting honorarium or speaking fees. At least, not nearly on the scale Clinton took it to.

Naw. Carter was the last one. Reagan was taking large speaking fees. The Bushes may have avoided doing so too much but they’re “old money”.

In Japan they have a wired for it, “amakudari” (descending from Heaven). I think it helps people understand the concept and the prevalence to have a dedicated word and not have to describe it.

One of the most notable deals I heard about for a politician was Obama getting a $65 million book advance [1] shortly after leaving office. I get that Obama's books sell a lot, but damn, that's huge.

It's obvious that once you become a high-ranking politician (especially President, VP, or a similar high-level position), wealth awaits you once you leave office. What's then the incentive to serve the people if you know that you'll make enough money to not give a damn once your tenure is over?

1- https://www.vox.com/culture/2017/3/2/14779892/barack-michell...

How does earning money from selling a book hurt your incentives to do a good job as a politician? It seems to me it makes them better: there's less temptation to take money from industries you were involved in regulating, and your book will sell better if people think you did good work in office.

You can't possibly be this naive. The people giving them money have access to power. Even a former president has plenty of contacts within the government as well as the public stage. They can be enormously persuasive on issues with the attention they get.

While it's a lot of money it's not out of keeping with the kind of sales they would have expected for his book. In it's first month "A Promised Land" sold 3.3M copies [1] and was the best selling book in the US for 2020! It's not clear to me what sort of "access to power" connections Penguin Random House would be getting out of this, and it's very clear that they got a lot of sales.

[1] https://global.penguinrandomhouse.com/announcements/a-promis...

The advance is fine. The buyers are suspect. (Though in this case, the buyers are likely largely a broad base of interested citizens. Rich Democratic Party women like buying books. )

Buying books in bulk (not for reading) is a standard way to bribe a politician, by laundering campaign funds to personal funds, or even sloppy direct purchases.

Several politicians have been caught, from local to national.

One example;

https://www.washingtonpost.com/lifestyle/media/gop-book-deal...

Wouldn't that make a large advance less concerning? At $65M it will be ~decades for him to earn out, which means the marginal book has ~no effect on his finances and isn't useful for bribing him.

It seems like small fish in dollar amounts compared to other things, and I wouldn't even call it bribery so much as just unethical considering it was coming from political organizations that are responsible for helping those politicians getting elected. Plus the intent was getting the books on best sellers lists, money was just the means.

> Buying books in bulk (not for reading) is a standard way to bribe a politician

Also a standard way to propagandize that the ideas within, and the author, are popular, whether or not the author is a politician.

OTOH, with a relatively young (for leaving the White House) and active figure (or couple), establishing a relationship as their publisher may have worth beyond the immediate book.

Asking a question, not starting an argument.

Is Trump the only President that didn't land in a pool full of cash when he left office and actually "lost" money / wealth while in office ?

Did Trump lose money? Seems almost impossible to fully account for all of his assets before and after his presidency.

I don't know really. I didn't see a 65 million dollar book advance. He wasn't too quick to hit the paid speaking engagements. Never ending lawsuits, more lawsuits don't really seem to be making him money...

His money is tied up in his brand. Everyone constantly talking about him is his brand and he’s very much in the school of thought that “all publicity is good publicity”.

> he’s very much in the school of thought that “all publicity is good publicity”.

Yeah he is, but I just can't see it being profitable at this point. His base isn't THAT big is it? His base is the poorest amongst current and previous Presidents.

Yet there are a lot of poor people willing to donate to mega church pastors that even have their own private planes, and his base probably overlaps with them quite a bit.

That’s not his income flow. Those people don’t pay him. They vote for him. His political clout then improves his brand.

He did lose money while in office, but some point to his deal with the Saudis for $2 billion for the LIV golf project he started with Greg Norman. But that seems to be more of an investment than a payoff, but that remains to be seen.

Well, he already had money before becoming President and everyone knew that. But, hell, did the people around him cash in. For instance, Jared Kushner (Special Adviser/son-in-law) and Steve Mnuchin (Treasury Secretary) founded private equity firms and raised $2 billion and $1 billion respectively from the Saudi government [1]. It's not illegal to do that, but it's really murky especially for Kushner who was not known for having investment experience outside real estate (Mnuchin, on the other hand, is a veteran investor who previously chaired a bank).

1- https://www.businessinsider.com/kusner-mnuchin-raised-combin...

Trump has been grifting his fans before, during, and after his Presidency.

Trump forced the government to spend money on his personal businesses during his Presidency.

Trump has been getting bribes before, during, and after his Presidency.

> Trump has been grifting his fans before, during, and after his Presidency.

We've seen politicians grift their supporters before. Looks at AOC and her 95$ _tax the rich hoodie_. I just find it hard to believe he has that many supporters with that deep of pockets to keep him flush. As far as statistics are concerned Trump's base is the poorest amongst current and previous Presidents.

> Trump forced the government to spend money on his personal businesses during his Presidency.

Right the golf trips.

> Trump has been getting bribes before, during, and after his Presidency.

That's just like business man, I suppose we can throw in tax avoidance in there too.

If you think AOC and Trump's level of corruption are even within one order of magnitude of each other then you need to seriously question how you evaluate the information you are receiving. Trump is orders of magnitude more self-serving, greedy, full of avarice, corrupt, and debased than any other politician in the U.S. right now.

Trump's son-in-law made billions during Trump's Presidency. Trump forced the Secret Service to stay at his hotels while he traveled and charged exorbitant prices. The list of examples goes on. There is nothing remotely comparable about AOC and Trump when it comes to corruption.

> If you think AOC and Trump's level of corruption are even within one order of magnitude of each other then you need to seriously question how you evaluate the information you are receiving. Trump is orders of magnitude more self-serving, greedy, full of avarice, corrupt, and debased than any other politician in the U.S. right now. Trump's son-in-law made billions during Trump's Presidency. Trump forced the Secret Service to stay at his hotels while he traveled and charged exorbitant prices. The list of examples goes on. There is nothing remotely comparable about AOC and Trump when it comes to corruption.

Corruption != Grifting

Nice try though.

There are instances where both words apply to the same situation. You have a serious deficiency when it comes to applying judgements consistently.

I'm sorry you feel that way and feel the need to punch down at someone that doesn't adhere to the same logic flow as you may.

How do you feel about Hunter Biden's _laptop from hell_ which was touted by the media as Russian disinfo but in recent months the media has in fact confirmed it's not Russian disinfo. It contains by some counts over 1,000 crimes committed by Hunter, his father, his uncle and close confidants.

https://bidenlaptopreport.marcopolousa.org/

I may not like the source or how facts are shown but it's very hard to look away from the train wreck.

I try to be consistent in my application of judgments. If Hunter committed a crime then I hope the appropriate punishment is given to him. It seems obvious that he benefitted financially when his dad was Vice President. I don’t approve of that sort corruption. I don’t like it when Trump did it or when anyone else does it.

I know nothing about Hinter’s laptop but I think it’s likely small potatoes so to speak and is used for political gain in the same way Benghazi was. I think it’s all political theater and merely used to induce outrage porn for the consumers of right wing media.

All media use outrage porn to attract viewers and increase revenue. This is not unique to right wing media.

Always found it suspicious how Al Gore became worth $100 million within two short years of leaving office. Clinton too.

Conveniently not covered in that article - the $65M was from Penguin Random House, which had been formed in a 2013 merger...which merger then-Pres. Obama evidently didn't oppose too strongly.

OTOH, it's at least arguable that Penguin Random House only cared about selling boatloads of pricey books. A quick Google found mention of a few yet-bigger advances, paid to mere authors...though for multi-book sets.

It’s not coincidence that Fed (and SEC) did not get in the way of Wall Street money machine at the height of SPAC and meme mania despite raging inflation. They continued QE even after admitting to inflation pressures that could toil the economy for years to come.

Now that Wall Street made all its money they’re going to crush asset prices just so these big fat bankers can scoop up distressed assets on the cheap. And so the cycle begins.

The US is actually one the most corrupt countries on earth.

What makes it worse: They always try to give lessons to the rest of the world, but meh.

The result is here: Record homeless Americans, drug addicts in the streets, health crisis, education crisis, while the ruling elite (it's even more hypocritical when it's the left like Yellen) gets even richer. Time for a revolution maybe.

Yellen is center-right, not left.

No way. Maybe at one time, but her comments in recent years put her way out of that category.

The U.S. has moved so far to the right the last 50 years that it has distorted the electorate's idea of what 'centrist' means. Regan believed the tax on capital ought to the higher than the tax on labor. Bush Sr. supported cap and trade when it came to acid rain. The EPA came about during Nixon's Presidency.

I don't know about the last 50 years, but in the last 15 years U.S. is moving rapidly to the left.

The U.S. is not moving rapidly to the left. Your perception is being skewed by how far to the right the U.S. is in comparison to other OECD nations. The Republican party is far more right wing than any other major comparable party in the OECD.

U.S. is rapidly moving to the left, that is a fact. It doesn't matter what other countries do.

It is not a fact. You are wrong on this. What meaningful left leaning policies have been implemented in the U.S. in the last 15 years?

Obamacare was a Republican idea designed by the Heritage Foundation in the 1990s. It was first implemented by Romney when he was governor of Massachusetts. There is no universal health care, there is no universal paid time off, there is no universal access to pre-school, there is no universal maternity leave, there is no universal sick leave, higher education is still extremely expensive at the point of usage, bankruptcy laws are still draconian, still no legal or law enforcement reform.

> Obamacare was a Republican idea designed by the Heritage Foundation in the 1990s.

I may be misremembering, but I think the basic outline was first proposed by an health insurance industry trade group during the debates over President Clinton’s proposed healthcare reform, and was popular with Republicans as an alternative, and the Heritage Foundation version was a further elaboration.

But, yeah, very far from Left.

Is this a statement about continental drift maybe?

Otherwise, citation needed, your feelings aren't facts.

"That which can be asserted without evidence can be dismissed without evidence."

> Time for a revolution maybe.

Just a heads up you're running a fine line with comments like that... don't be surprised if the alphabet boys label you a "domestic terrorist".

> The US is actually one the most corrupt countries on earth.

That's an enormous allegation. But I don't think it holds up.

The US has corruption, but actual bribery is rare, and the reason we're so outraged is because we have the attitude and expectation that no one should be corrupt. This is like saying "I wouldn't want to live in a bright room - I'd see a roach or two! I'd rather keep the lights down low."

There are hundreds of millions of dollars of bribes exchanging hands every year: https://www.opensecrets.org/political-action-committees-pacs...

PACs are the method of bribery in American politics. Anyone can contribute in unlimited amounts. The other is donations to foundations owned by the politician, and of course speaking fees.

You perceive these as bribes, but you can also perceive them as exactly what they are called. Political Action Committees, a group of people/companies who have a common political purpose, spending money towards that goal.

PACs spend a lot of their money simply doing things that help a candidate. Do you want to make it illegal for groups of people whose funding is opaque, to do anything that benefits a candidate? If one guy puts out a lawn sign for his favored candidate, it's free speech, but if a few neighbors pool their money and rent a billboard, now it's a corrupt PAC engaged in bribery?

PACs definitely have problems and are sources of abuse, but simply calling them bribery is so over the top it's ridiculous.

If you think that "hundreds of millions of dollars" is actually supporting the assertion that the US is the most corrupt country in the world... well, clearly, some perspective is needed. My home country, morocco, which is comparatively way poorer than the US, has a corruption industry that probably goes into the low billions of dollars a year. And that's assuming superpacs are actually a form of corruption, which is very, very debatable. Even EU farming subsidies probably qualify for the term more than superpacs.

Those types of issues are mostly handled by local & state governments, which vary wildly in corruption from locality to locality. So many eyes are on the federal government while some city governments have much crazier things going on that have more of an immediate impact.

Detail of fees and organizations [0]. Biggest are (in order): Citadel, Citi, Credit Suisse.

[0] https://www.swfinstitute.org/news/83524/janet-yellens-speaki...

Not unrelated: The House of Saud is losing a lot of money on the Credit Suisse rescue/buyout.

"Some estimates of the royal family's wealth measure their net worth at $1.4 trillion."

A billion isn't worth losing sleep over here.

Basically the worth of a nation given to one family.

considering their grip on Saudi Arabia, that's the worth of a nation.

That's how monarchies work

Yes, sorry, I know I was stating the obvious. It's rare that we see that wealth publicized and it took me by surprise.

Nothing that Aramco can't make up for in a few weeks.

The House of Saud is sitting on the real money printer.

Officially, it's the Saudi National Bank that is getting burned. But, in an absolute monarchy, you might as well say it's Crown Prince MBS because there's no distinction.

There's a reason why Forbes does not even rank royals' wealth. It's a futile journey trying to decipher what belongs to the king and what belongs to the state. But, note that the king must spend a lot on social services (free healthcare, free education (both local and foreign) in Saudi Arabia, etc., to please his countrymen, lest they revolt.

So did Hillary Clinton and I’m sure Yellen is just as uninfluenced by them as she was.

Anyone who thinks that people (on either side of the political aisle) are not influenced by big-money payouts, does not understand human nature. Corporations would not offer these kinds of payments in the form of 'speaking fees' if they didn't think it would influence decision makers.

I think he was being facetious.

What the OP alleges [1] Hillary did is crooked and corrupted by any reasonable standard, if not illegal; which says more about out laws than or does redeem the corrupt.

[1] "alleges" because I don't want to start something. Everyone on the forum knows where they stand on the Clintons.

> Corporations would not offer these kinds of payments in the form of 'speaking fees' if they didn't think it would influence decision makers.

You underestimate the prestige value in securing these speaking engagements. To know whether these companies believe that they're buying (or rewarding) regulators, it would be helpful to compare all the speakers they pay. If they're also paying huge fees to Hollywood actors or other celebrities--people who clearly cannot offer quid pro quo--than that augurs in favor of these companies merely buying prestige.

From a quick Google Search, Warren Buffet, for example, supposedly charges $100k-$200k for a speaking engagement. (EDIT: I'm dubious that this is factual--looking through results it seems booking agencies might be including well-known personalities in their databases as a sales tactic, even if they have no relationship. In any event, celebrities are expensive, and top regulators and political appointees are celebrities even outside their field.)

> Yellen listed firms and banks where she had received speaking fees and said she intended to “seek written authorization” from ethics officials to “participate personally and substantially” in matters involving them

What the hell? The speaking fees themselves should have been banned, but she doesn’t have to recuse herself? Any “ethics” official that approved that needs to be fired.

I like the Singaporean model of benchmarking high-ranking government salaries to a percent of the pay of top earners in the country (https://www.dollarsandsense.sg/heres-much-singapores-preside..., https://www.psd.gov.sg/docs/default-source/default-document-...), and pairing that with very active anticorruption enforcement.

MPs get paid over $1M USD under this model, but it incentives are much more aligned under this model.

We're talking money in the range of $100 million and upwards that these politicians make within a few years in office. The anti corruption has to be the primary focus because the incentive to make money even with $1M salary is huge.

I thought this was common knowledge

It would never happen, but I wish there were a central web site with accurate information of income sources for all people employed, or once employed, by the federal government.

It is fairly well known that high profile people like Bill and Hillary Clinton make a fortune giving talks to Wall Street insiders, etc. I think it is also important to know if lower level bureaucrats start getting lots of money from companies they steered contracts to.

This is not a Democrat or Republican problem specifically since politicians on both sides get campaign funding and support from the same sources.

'Speaking fees' is a euphemism for 'after-office bribe'.

after, before, or between-office bribe. Yellem is in office now and was before.

What evidence is there that Yellen's policies or speeches were influenced?

There doesn't need to be evidence of actual influence. The mere existence of such an obvious conflict of interest is itself corruption.

The huge sums of money she was given to 'speak'; that's the evidence she was influenced.

[2021]

Obama appointed Yellen to be the Federal Reserve chair in 2014. Trump replaced her with Jerome Powell in 2018. Biden appointed her to her current position as Secretary of the Treasury in 2021. This article is from then, about speaking fees in 2019 and 2020 when she was not working in government.

It's reasonable to be concerned about how payments from industry before or after holding office might affect decisions while in office, though.

people are too afraid to change the system in case it collapses (usually younger ones). Older people are the majority and taking advantage of it any way they can, and they are giving free passes to each other. Old wise men/women run the world. This is a weird timeline , a reversal of the '60s

She will preside over the Great Recession 2.0 just like Bernanke. Nothing wrong due to her really, she just inherited the mess that never got cleared since Bernanke time. By then she will need a Nobel to match Bernanke.

The issue I have with those attacks on Yellen are two-fold :

First, as this article show, they come from everywhere (ie she's at the same time a sellout and not listening to the banking industry), and are very sudden. If she was incompetent from the start, it would have been different, but from what I read pre 2023, the main concern for right wing guys is that she was (ordered from likely to be true to less likely): a woman, too partisan, friend to Obama/the Clinton (from breibart) and following the rabbit hole, a pedophile. And regular conservative/liberal outlet had nothing to say about her (I'll pass on the critic from the left as it's a critic of institutions and not of the person). It feel weird and unnatural.

Second, even if she is incompetent, caused suffering all over the world as millionaires and billionaires took a haircut, one thing I'm really certain of is that people would rather attack a specific person than what created the position they're in. Or more accurately, point at specifics rather than globals.

It feels like operation scapegoat to me tbh.

Over the top speaking fees is an equivalent of over the top priced alcohol in establishments involved in money laundering.

It is only acceptable, because lawmakers don't want to close the door to getting paid for favours.

I think she is free now to talk everywhere, isn't she?

As Secretary of the US Treasury she may be quite busy though.

I understand, I didn't know she still works there, so she is in an interest conflict and handling sensitive information.

She was not when she did these speaking engagements.

This is years old. She wasn’t doing this while working in gov.

Obviously! That would be illegal. The trick is that the people paying the fees know that:

- you're well connected

- you'll be back in government as soon as the administrations change.

Or do you really think Biden (or Trump, or DeSantis, or whoever you want) would have chosen as secretary the bank administrator of Springfield Oklahoma's largest credit union? That would be daft.

So the relevant part is that "unemployed" Yellen was "[..] the Federal Reserve chair from 2014 to 2018."

When her term ended: "She took in the speaking fees in 2019 and 2020."

And, after an arduous two year job search she's a cabinet level secretary regulating those she collected fees from.

Creepy how most here find this ok...

Shocking

These speaking fees HAVE to be kickbacks, right? I've attended a few of these things before and the talks have almost no substance, and the speakers just regurgitate things they've said before in the press or on official business. These don't equate to an industry leader or SME giving a talk on a technical or vocational subject.

Of course! But they're not technically illegal. So you can charge hundreds of thousands of dollars plus expenses for a one hour talk.

They make more per performance than most of the biggest music stars. Consider that the "Friends" stars, at their height, only made $1 million/episode which took far more than ten hours to make and was broadcast and loved by hundreds of millions (if not billions?) around the world.

Obviously it's a graft. But! How do you make this illegal within our constitutional framework? A cure must but be worse than the disease.

Just like charging $10k for a bottle of champagne is not illegal, but it means you don't have to open as many car washes to put the cash through. Just have the dealers book the table and pay cash for the champs. Then just pay tax and money is squeaky clean.

Similar story with the speech circuit. Politicians do favours and then once they are out of office they go on a tour to collect payments. Everyone knows what it is, but there is no interest in making this a criminal offence, because every single politician in office wants to cash in once they are out.

"A cure must but be worse than the disease."

I meant:

"A cure CANNOT be worse than the disease." - autocorrect fail

There definitely is a kickback aspect, but another one is that they are paying these speakers for the cachet of their "presence". If you spend time in and around some of these events (thinktanks, management consulting, and Wall Street, are especially brutal for this) they are really about signaling competence. It's the same reason that they hire fresh undergrads from almost exclusively ivy leagues regardless of that fresh graduate's major -- the "name brand" of the degree is the signaling for competence. Whether the talks are actually of any substance at all is beside the point (and attendants will actually whine if the talk is too technical). Just getting them in the room and sending out the PR blasts is worth it for the longtail influence on the perception of the org.

Big deal. I mean I know I am totally incorruptible by the influence of money so I am sure Yellen is as well. I mean, she has to make a living, right? Right? RIGHT? I mean if we stop her from getting this money what will happen when I become important and want, I mean, need these speaking fees to put food on my table? Do you literally want to starve Yellen's grandchildren????

(Either people do not know I was being sarcastic or I will become very depressed.)

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