Just call Ron Bloom the go-to guy for the automakers requesting bailout funds.
Swamp: Forgoing the appointment of a single "car czar," the Obama administration chose to create a multi-agency task force led by Larry Summers, chief White House economic advisor, and Timothy Geithner, treasury secretary. Bloom will have the day-to-day task of working with carmakers, their bondholders and labor unions.
Bloom is a Harvard Business School graduate and a former vice president with the Wall Street firm Lazard Ltd., focusing on the steel and airline industries.
As an aide to the steelworkers union's president, he helped resolve a 10-month strike against the Wheeling-Pittsburgh Corp. in 1997 and brokered an agreement with Goodyear Tire in 2003 requiring the tire maker to refinance its debt quickly, maintain its U.S. plants and limit executive pay.
So they're not calling him the car czar.
More on Bloom-just-don't-call-him-a-czar:
WSJ: Ron Bloom, whom the Treasury Department is expected to bring in as a senior adviser to help handle the U.S. auto industry’s restructuring, is a special assistant to the president of United Steelworkers union and a former investment banker.
Mr. Bloom’s negotiating skills may play a key role in shaping the Obama administration’s policies toward the auto industry. It was reported Sunday that the administration won’t name a single “car czar” to help oversee the restructuring process as originally planned. Instead, President Barack Obama will support a new inter-agency task force to deal with the issue, according to senior administration officials. And Mr. Bloom, in his early fifties, is among the players in the administration’s new strategy.
Mr. Bloom attended Harvard Business School, where he gravitated to populist business cases and was keenly interested in employee buyouts. After 10 years at investment banks, among them Lazard, he became special assistant to the USW president in 1996.
Both inside and outside the USW, Mr. Bloom is known as a financially savvy negotiator — with a tendency to spout profanities. In a 2007 article depicting Mr. Bloom’s role in the Wheeling-Pittsburgh Corp. takeover battle, The Wall Street Journal wrote some USW members thought Mr. Bloom is “too cozy with the moneymen.”
Vitals from the AP:
NAME - Ron Bloom
AGE/HOMETOWN - 53; New York, N.Y.
EXPERIENCE - Special assistant to president, United Steelworkers union, 1996-present; founding partner of Keilin and Bloom, an investment banking firm, 1990-1996; vice president, Lazard Freres & Co.; 1985-1990. Also worked as a research and negotiating specialist, Service Employees International Union; as New England regional director of the Jewish Labor Committee; and as executive director of the Massachusetts Coalition for Full Employment.
EDUCATION - Undergraduate degree from Wesleyan University, 1977; MBA, Harvard Graduate School of Business Administration, 1985.
