The Guy Who's Got $700 Billion of Your Money

Meet the 35-year-old who Paulson just tapped to manage the bailout

Paris Hilton is famous for making retailers swoon at the sight of her checkbook. But she's got nothing on Neel Kashkari, the 35-year-old treasury official who has just been handed $700 billion to spend on mortgage securities. And if you think that getting through such a high pile of money is hardly rocket science, the new guy is a rocket scientist to boot.

Treasury Secretary Henry Paulson has tapped Kashkari, a fellow Goldman Sachs alumnus, to manage the bailout of America's financial system. That's a hefty responsibility for a man little more than six years out of business school who is virtually unknown outside a small group of investment bankers.

Colleagues describe Kashkari as sharp, meticulous, and something of a slave driver, despite having a lighthearted sense of humor. Over the past year, when working on the Treasury Department's response to the housing crisis, he developed a reputation for e-mailing requests to his staff past midnight.

"He used to work at NASA before he worked in finance, so he's literally a rocket scientist, which you need to be."

Some of his most important work involved forming Hope Now, a government-backed mortgage industry alliance aimed at minimizing foreclosures. "He's immersed himself in all of the housing issues while at Treasury, and he's quickly become very versatile," said Faith Schwartz, Hope Now’s executive director. "He was very good at convening different groups to get them marching in the same direction."

Home owners threatened with foreclosure have a rather different view. The National Community Reinvestment Coalition, a group of community-based organizations critical of the bailout package, has complained that Kashkari has not put enough pressure on lenders to prevent foreclosures. The coalition also described him as hard to read—a sentiment echoed, at least initially, by a financial world whose fate largely depends on a man that until a few days ago it didn't even know existed.

"He wasn't volunteering a lot of his thoughts," the coalition president John Taylor said, recalling a meeting in which he proposed an aggressive loan purchase program that Kashkari later rejected. "A lot of pain and a lot of loss on Wall Street has occurred since we had those conversations."

Kashkari grew up in a suburb of Stow, Ohio, the son of Chaman, an engineer—and a first generation immigrant from Kashmir, India—and Sheila, a pathologist. (Chaman grew up poor; his father worked as a clerk.) Kashkari is a Hindu name, although Kashmir is overwhelmingly Muslim.