Jeb Bush has raised 114 million dollars so far and everyone is wondering how much of that cash came from his Wall Street boyz. Fox News Business' Charles Gasparino was flummoxed today because Jeb Bush's campaign refused to discuss his time with Lehman Brothers as the global financial markets collapsed.
Jeb Bush apparently doesn’t want people to know that he worked at Lehman Brothers, the now-defunct investment bank whose collapse led to the broader financial meltdown in 2008.
That’s the only conclusion I can come to after receiving a series of occasionally bizarre emails from his press people to what I thought was a fairly simple question about Bush’s work before he became a Republican presidential candidate.
Here’s what we know: In 2008, as Lehman was falling into insolvency because of its bad bet on real estate—among the first of many banks that would do so that year—Bush took part in a firm effort to save the company. Inside Lehman, the process of raising new capital and trying to dispose of all those bad assets on its balance sheet was known as “Project Green.”
Bush’s piece of this firm-wide effort was termed “Project Verde” (Spanish for Green), and it involved convincing the world’s richest man, Mexican billionaire Carlos Slim, to make a potentially life-saving investment into Lehman.
How do I know this? Not from the Bush people or even from all those tax returns he released last week, but from countless anonymous sources on Wall Street and one source who isn’t: Anton Valukas, a Reagan appointed former U.S. Attorney who went on to become the examiner for the Lehman bankruptcy...read on
Gasparino goes to great lengths to explain why he feels that Jeb Bush is trying to skirt his Lehman Brothers ties. He also feels that since Wall Street influenced government after the collapse in 2008 and since Jeb was at the firm that tipped off the biggest collapse in recent memory, understanding his role in all of it is important for the American people to know.