I am a fan of the news. I read as many different newspapers from around the country as often as I can, and every once in a while, I see what amounts to an afterthought that really should have a story of its own. Recently, I came across a piece in the Chicago Sun-Times discussing a possible challenger to Rahm Emanuel for mayor of the city with a pair of particularly interesting, but almost completely unrelated, tidbits.
According to the article, the potential candidate, Karen Lewis, president of the Chicago Teacher's Union, frequently rails against the influence of the wealthy in Chicago. The article goes on to point out that Karen Lewis, despite claims that she is a part of the middle class, makes over $200,000 annually and owns three homes (including a vacation home in Hawaii), which puts her ahead of over 95% of the population in terms of earnings. However, relatively wealthy politicians railing against other relatively wealthy politicians for being wealthy is so common it's boring. What is interesting are two sentences about how Rahm Emanuel made his money:
Lewis isn’t as wealthy as Emanuel, a multimillionaire who made his fortune during a short stint as an investment banker.
According to Wikipedia, Emanuel worked for Wasserstein Perella as the MD of their Chicago office for 2.5 years across eight deals. Despite his lack of prior banking experience, Emanuel seemed to have some success during his relatively short stint, which leads to the article's other interesting sentence:
Emanuel, who made $18 million in 2 1/2 years as an investment banker, lives in Ravenswood in a home he bought in 1998 for $695,000.
MDs are some of the highest paid people in the world, but averaging over $7 million a year for the first two years of work seems incredible! I really wish the article was about how Emanuel accomplished such a feat as it would've made it much more interesting. What do you monkeys think? Think you'll be able to beat Emanuel's earnings for your first 2.5 years as MD?
Pretty easy to make money in the private sector if you are coming out of 8 years as a senior advisor to the president...
Exactly... connections pay a hell of alot these days.
I love this sort of stuff. These guys climb to power by exploiting the masses' disdain for rich people, yet they themselves are children of capitalism. There should be an IQ test to vote... we would have a lot less of these types of people in office.
Rahm's a beast (his brother is also the real life Ari Gold)
And their other brother is the lead surgeon at John Hopkins....
He's a Bolshevik - architect of Obamacare.
I'm sure that in his time on campaigns/in the white house he was really digging into the nuts and bolts of accounting, valuation, M&A law, corporate finance, etc
yes this is the way bribery works in the USA. There are too many examples to count but check out Robert rubins career...I believe he made about 100 million at Citibank hired a year after he engineered their bailout in the Mexican "tequila crisis".
@bondarb is right on the bribery thing. The revolving door of politics is pretty disgusting. Both parties do it and unfortunately it's just how politics works. What did Cheney make off of Halliburton as his exit bonus right before he became VP?
But regarding Rahm's pay: MD's primary responsibility is to bring in business and make sure deals get done. I'd imagine that not too many people are going to decline to take a call from the former WH Chief of Staff whose administration is still in office. It's politics and dirty but I'd imagine he generated a decent amount of business.
2 things:
1) Pretty sure Rahm was only successful in his IB years because of his brother.
2) If Karen Lewis is elected, my entire firm is likely to leave Chicago, lol. That would be the last straw. I mean, Rahm is terrible, but Karen would take the term "liberal shithole" to a whole new level.
Why do corrupt liberals have to ruin all of the best cities?
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