The Treasury's "cash and carry" plan

Is it just me or does this guy give you the creeps too?

What is it about the photo department at the Treasury Department that they insist on providing these hideous pictures of their top personnel?

Surely, something can be done here. No? Maybe just relax the eyebrows a little bit?

This hi-resolution photo (brace yourself) of Treasury Secretary Hank Paulson remains in its usual place despite what must have been hundreds of complaints by now about irregular pacemaker activity after senior citizens stumbled upon it and after little girls were frightened after innocently clicking on the link.

Well there's another picture up at the Treasury Department now and, for my own sake, I haven't bothered to look and see if there's a hi-res version.

Anyway, the other day, interim Assistant Secretary for Financial Stability Neel Kashkari detailed progress made on the the Treasury's new Troubled Asset Relief Program where toxic assets on bank's balance sheets will be replaced with good, clean U.S. dollars.

Could they have picked a guy with a better name to implement this "cash and carry" plan?

There's more about Mr. Kash-and-kari in this report at Bloomberg:

Kashkari Leaps From Obscurity to Lead Role in Rescue
Minutes before Neel Kashkari's public debut as the chief of the U.S. Treasury's financial rescue plan, he sat in a hotel lobby in Washington, unrecognized by many of the international bankers gathering to hear him speak.

By the time Kashkari finished his 21-minute address yesterday, laying out Treasury's first concrete details of the $700 billion bailout, a swarm of television cameras and reporters followed him out the door.

In less than two weeks, the 35-year-old former Goldman Sachs Group Inc. banker has risen from obscurity to center stage in the U.S. financial crisis. He has been given extraordinary latitude, and not much time, to set up an organization and procedures for carrying out the Treasury's counteroffensive on the market meltdown.
...
Kashkari's appointment earlier this month drew comment from Wall Street veterans and industry observers because of his youth, his relative inexperience with markets and his ties to Goldman, where Paulson had been chief executive officer.

``It was unfortunate that it was yet another Goldman Sachs person taking the helm,'' said Michael Greenberger, a former official at the Commodity Futures Trading Commission and now a professor at University of Maryland School of Law. ``Essentially it appears that he is turning to the very financial institutions that led to the problems to fix the problems.''

He used to be an aerospace engineer, so he can't be all bad.

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UPDATE: Wed, Oct 15th, 9:30 PM PST

This just in from Justin over at the Implode-O-Meter: