Interviews/Profiles

Treasury Secretary Geithner's potential departure is highlighting how much Wall Street's reputation has recovered from the financial crisis.

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Timothy Massad has what might be one of the most unenviable tasks in Washington: winding down the Troubled Asset Relief Program.

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Convicted financier Bernard Madoff, in an interview published Wednesday, implied that the banks and hedge funds that invested with him "had to know" of the fraud he perpetrated.

In his first interview since his December 2008 arrest for operating the largest Ponzi scheme in U.S. history, Madoff said banks were guilty of having a "willful blindness" toward his operation.

“They had to know," Madoff told The New York Times. “But the attitude was sort of, ‘If you’re doing something wrong, we don’t want to know.' "

Madoff is serving a 150-year prison sentence in North Carolina for running his Ponzi scheme for 16 years and taking in $20 billion in lost cash and $65 billion in paper wealth, according to the Times.

In the interview, Madoff acknowledged his guilt but refused to name specific banks or hedge funds that might have been accomplices. But he said several were "complicit" because they did not do their homework on his scheme.

“I would have loved for them to not lose anything, but that was a risk they were well aware of by investing in the market,” he wrote in an e-mail to the Times.

Ken Feinberg is no stranger to managing billions of dollars and dealing with victims of disasters, experience he'll need for his next job, overseeing claims for the Gulf oil spill.

Feinberg was named by White House officials on Wednesday to head a $20 billion escrow account funded by BP for the oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico. 

He's taken on some of the toughest financial and emotional jobs in the nation — overseeing the compensation of top executives under the federal bailout plan, determining how much to pay families from the September 11th Victims Compensation Fund and working with the Hokie Spirit Memorial Fund for families of those killed in a shooting rampage on the Virginia Tech campus in 2007. 

He'll face emotional Gulf residents and business owners struggling as the oil spill spreads across four states — Louisiana, Alabama, Mississippi and Florida — in need of compensation as the spill takes its toll on the economy. 

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