Felix Salmon isn’t too impressed with any of the three main candidates to replace Larry Summers as head of the NEC. Roger Altman and Richard Levin both have substantial ties to Wall Street, and then:
Finally there’s Sperling, who in some ways is the worst of the three when it comes to grubbing money from Wall Street. The other two have well-defined and easily-understood jobs; Sperling, by contrast, signed up with the Harry Walker Agency and started giving speeches to anybody with cash, including not only Citigroup but even Allen Stanford. He also wrote a monthly 900-word column for Bloomberg for $137,500 a year, which works out at about $13 per word.
This really brings things home to a scribbler like me. Being paid a million bucks a year for some kind of ill-defined financial “consulting” is one thing. I don’t really know anything about what that entails. But writing? I know all about that, and $11,000 for an op-ed is a wee bit excessive, no? At least, it is if it’s really just the writing you’re paying for.
