Space engineer blasts into US bank rescue efforts

WASHINGTON: The latest character in the cast of leading figures fighting the financial crisis is a 35-year-old former space engineer whose stellar career has led him to the heart of US rescue efforts.

Neel Kashkari, an American of Indian descent and a former executive at investment bank Goldman Sachs, has been tasked by the US Treasury with managing the 700-billion-dollar bank bailout program.

Kashkari, whose first name can mean "10 million millions" in Hindi, strode onto the international scene on October 6 when he was named by his mentor US Treasury Secretary Henry Paulson as head of the Office of Financial Stability.

On Monday, he outlined plans on how the TARP (Troubled Assets Relief Program) would work, setting the scene for the historic announcement Tuesday that the US government would buy stakes in some of the country's biggest banks.

A total 250 billion dollars is to be spent on buying equity in some of the most famous name in finance, including banks such as Citigroup, JPMorgan Chase and Bank of America, as well as a broad array of smaller lenders.

The man overseeing this was born in the midwestern state of Ohio and who initially followed in his father's footsteps by pursuing engineering studies, choosing the University of Illinois for his bachelor's and master's degrees.

This took him to a research and development company in California which was working for the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA), notably on the James Webb Space Telescope project.

The telescope is scheduled for launch into orbit in 2013 to replace the iconic Hubble where it will attempt to unlock mysteries of the Universe by finding the first galaxies that formed after the Big Bang.

After gaining an MBA from University of Pennsylvania's Wharton School, he headed into finance.

Kashkari worked in Goldman's San Francisco office on mergers and acquisitions in the information technology industry while Paulson was chief executive of the leading investment bank.

His appointment raised eyebrows in some quarters, given the seemingly revolving door between Goldman Sachs and government, his youth and his relative inexperience of markets.

The meteoric rise of the young man with a clean-shaven head is entirely down to Paulson, whom Kashkari went to work for as an advisor at the Treasury when Paulson left Goldman Sachs to take up his job as Secretary of State in mid-2006.

Allies have sought to counter any skepticism, insisting on his organizational abilities and capacity for hard work.

David McCormick, undersecretary of international affairs at the Treasury Department and Kashkari's most recent boss, told NPR public radio: "He's a very quick study, as I said: very bright, very organized and very analytical.

"All prerequisites to doing the kind of triage and making the kind of choices he's going to have to make."

Kashkari made clear his political leanings in comments at the American Enterprise Institute on September 19 this year.

"I'm a free-market Republican," he said, in remarks that might come back to haunt him when the Senate comes to validating his nomination.

Like Paulson, his free-market ideology has had to give way due to the pressing need to stabilize financial markets. He is now responsible for the biggest government intervention in the banking sector since the Great Depression of the 1930s.

The married "Mr. 700 Billion" is also a new public face for the Indian-origin minority in the United States. His parents emigrated from Kashmir in the 1960s.

The Indian-origin community in the United States represents just 0.9 per cent of the population, according to official figures from 2006, but they are generally better educated than the population as a whole.

An estimated 35.5 per cent of those over 25 years of age have degrees, above the broader US public average of 9.9 per cent.