Can We Trust Treasury Secretary Jack Lew?

That may seem odd, given that, as Bloomberg News and others noted, Lew was managing director and chief operating officer of Citi Global Wealth Management, then moved in 2008 to Citi Alternative Investments, “which managed billions of dollars in private-equity and hedge-fund investments” — the kinds of deals that are as common in the Cayman Islands as pina coladas.

Granted, Lew has said on several occasions that he wasn’t responsible for Citigroup’s investment decisions. And true, $56,000 to many is minuscule compared to the aforementioned $688 million Chinese hotel deal, and may seem even less when stacked up against an estimated up to $11.5 trillion in offshore assets held worldwide.  But as Iowa Republican Chuck Grassley pointed out to Lew at the Senate confirmation hearings, with his toe dipping into Cayman Islands-based funds, “You invested more money there than the average American makes in a year.”

And that’s the problem. Jack Lew is, by all accounts, a decent guy and dedicated public servant, but like so many of our recent treasury secretaries – Robert Rubin, Henry Paulson, Timothy Geithner – so deeply immersed in the old boy nexus of Wall Street and government as to have little comprehension of how, in the midst of a soaring Dow Jones, so many millions struggle to make ends meet. Nor, we fear, much willingness to resist when the next fiscal meltdown hits and the banks once more demand taxpayer billions to be taken off the hook they baited themselves.

In the weeks leading up to his swearing-in at Treasury, we learned how New York University, a non-profit, gave Jack Lew more than a million dollars in mortgage loans when he became executive vice president of operations there and a $685,000 severance when he left the university to join Citigroup – all at a time when student tuition fees were going through the roof (and NYU was receiving a kickback: .25 percent of net student loans from the bank it was pushing to students as a “preferred lender” – Citigroup). And we learned that Lew’s multimillion-dollar Citigroup contract included a $944,518 bonus if he moved on to a “full time high level position with the U.S. government or regulatory body.” (Remember, too, that in the years while Lew happened to be there, Citigroup’s stock lost 85 percent of shareholder value as it received $45 billion in taxpayer bailout cash.)

Jack Lew and his employers have provided seemingly logical explanations for all of these – Kevin Drum at Mother Jones magazine was told that Lew’s Citigroup bonus for moving to a government job, negotiated up front before said job happened “avoids the problem of voluntarily either paying or nor paying a big bonus to someone who will exercise power over it in the future.” But each of the perks in Lew’s past contracts is typical of the friendly deals made amongst the endowed elite, the same who leap at the chance to shelter cash on idyllic tropical hideaways, far away from the clutches of the IRS.

So keep your eye on Jack Lew’s stewardship of the nation’s bankbooks. You may know him by the company he keeps. As the poet wrote, no man is an island — Cayman or otherwise.