Bailout Role Elevates U.S. Official

Late last week, as Congress prepared to vote on the bailout package, Mr. Paulson gathered his top aides in his office to discuss how to get the program up and running for the next administration to take over.

Mr. Kashkari said that when Mr. Paulson told the aides, “I want Neel to run this,” he was honored but not surprised, given their close working relationship.

His reply was simple, he recalled: “I said ‘O.K.’ ”

Mr. Kashkari, who grew up near Akron, Ohio, is a first-generation Indian-American. His parents had grown up in poverty in the Kashmir region of India before becoming an engineer and a doctor and coming to the United States.

Mr. Kashkari’s older sister, Meera Kashkari Kelley, said in an interview that the experiences of their parents shaped their childhoods.

“They ingrained in us the perspective that our origins were relatively poor,” she said. “I think that gave us a great appreciation for the opportunities that people have in this country.”

Mr. Kashkari stood out in his family. While everyone else leaned liberal, his sister said, he gravitated toward free-market Republican views.

As a high school student at the Western Reserve Academy in Hudson, Ohio, Mr. Kashkari excelled in math and was chosen by his classmates to be the graduation speaker.

After high school, Mr. Kashkari initially opted for an engineering career, earning an undergraduate and master’s degree from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. He also met his wife, Minal, a mechanical engineer who works on NASA projects, on campus.

Mr. Kashkari worked for several years as a satellite engineer for TRW before earning an M.B.A. from the Wharton School.

“Neel was one of the strongest students in my class,” said Anjani Jain, the vice dean and director of the graduate division. “I remember him fondly as a gentle but persuasive student. He got a lot done.”

After graduating in 2002, Mr. Kashkari joined Goldman Sachs, where he specialized in helping start-up computer security companies get financing or sell themselves to larger companies.

One was FrontBridge Technologies, an e-mail security company that Mr. Kashkari worked with for several years. He helped the company with its acquisition by Microsoft in August 2005 for several hundred million dollars, according to Steve Jillings, its former chief executive. (The terms of the deal were not publicly disclosed.)

Bradford Koenig, now retired, who ran Mr. Kashkari’s technology banking group at Goldman Sachs, said their interaction was “a very positive experience.” But, he added, they had relatively little contact because Mr. Kashkari was a junior banker.

Now, Mr. Kashkari’s skills in working with powerful people will be tested. David Smith, chief economist for the House Financial Services Committee, said that despite concerns over his age, Mr. Kashkari is “a serious guy.” Still, he said, Congress will watch his decisions very closely.

“It’s not simply that he’s never done it before — no one has ever done it before,” he said. “So scrutiny will be and should be intense.”

Copyright © 2012 The New York Times

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