Obama's Fed Nominee, Who Was Busted And Quit For "Impropriety", Reports Up To $40 Million In Assets

1/27/2015
Tyler Durden

Three weeks ago, when reporting on Obama's close personal friend and Bank of Hawaii "community banker" appointee to the Fed board, Allan Landon, we emphasized an apparently trivial data point that had somehow managed to slip through the background due diligence process.

 Namely, that about a decade ago, the same Landon stepped down as board member from the Seattle Federal Home Loan Bank after he was found - always in the passive voice - to have "failed to comply with a rule requiring the disclosure of conflicts of interest by a director by failing to make disclosure to the Seattle Bank board of their institutions' planned redemptions."The full story can be read here, but in a nutshell a banker that the president himself has appointed to join the US money printing authority was on the cusp of being investigated for embezzlement, and was forced to quietly disappear into the night despite denying "any wrongdoing."

Today we learn just how much assets the banker who at least once was caught with "borderline embezzlement" made during his humble tenure as a "community banker."

Reuters reports that Landon has up to $40.1 million worth of personal assets, according to government disclosure forms obtained by Reuters, which would make him one of the wealthiest Fed governors if confirmed to the post. As a reference point, according to Janet Yellen's most recent disclosures, her assets rose by at least 8% during 2013, raising their total to between $5.3 million and $14.1 million. This makes Obama's friendly, neighborhood banker guy more than 3x richer in the higher estimate.

And all Landon had to do was not get caught while allegedly embezzling. Well, not get caught more than once.

Some more on Landon's net worth:

Landon's personal wealth is high compared to other Fed governors and well above the previous person on the Fed who represented the community banking industry. That representative was former Fed Governor Elizabeth Duke, whose reported assets in 2012 ranged from $4.4 million to $10 million.

Landon's assets, which include holdings in the Bank of Hawaii and a Fidelity fund, range from $9.7 million to $40.1 million, according to Landon's public financial disclosure filing with the U.S. Office of Government Ethics. The agency's financial disclosure reports require a range of asset size and not specific amounts.

That range is just below the disclosed assets of Fed Governor Jerome Powell, who was an investment banker at Dillon Reed and Carlyle Group partner before being appointed to the Fed.

Among Landon's investments are holdings in the Second Curve Opportunity Fund, FTVentures and Chronic Intelligence Inc, a software company based in Utah.

So in summary: Obama's personal pick for a banker that is "representative" of the common man will not only fulfill that requirement with net assets that are perfectly indicative of the middle-class American, somewhere between $10 and $40 million (the variance can supposedly be attributed to whether or not Virtu's momentum ignition algos have blown up one or more of his stocks), but who will clearly not put the stock market first and foremost on the list of things that the Fed is supposed to wealth effect.

source