Politico:

Antonio Weiss, the Wall Street banker who President Barack Obama had picked to be the third-ranking official at the Treasury Department, has asked that the president not resend his nomination to the Senate following a major backlash from progressive Democrats who questioned his ties to the financial industry, POLITICO has learned.Obama accepted the decision, which Weiss conveyed in a letter to the president over the weekend. But the Lazard banker will still join the administration in the position of counselor to Treasury Secretary Jack Lew, which does not require Senate confirmation.

Of course, Weiss will still ends up in the mix of the people who influence Treasury policy since he is going to be a counselor to Lew.The opposition to Lew was focused specifically on his work at Lazard that reportedly included corporate tax inversions such as the one undertaken by Burger King (I’ve written about the Burger King tax inversion here, among other posts on the topic).

However, it’s still important that the larger point was made: the government has plenty of people influencing economic policy who come from the very institutions that have caused the economic crisis…not just the recent Depression but the crisis facing workers that has been building and escalating over decades.

The credit for this has to go to Elizabeth Warren who spearheaded the opposition. Here she talks about that opposition in the context of the general revolving door between Wall Street executives and the Treasury Department:

Bernie Sanders on this:

“I have no personal animosity toward Mr. Weiss but I am very glad he withdrew his nomination. The president needs economic advisors who do not come from Wall Street. In fact, he needs advisors prepared to stand up to Wall Street. We need economic policies in this country which ask the wealthy and large corporations to pay their fair share of taxes and which create millions of good-paying jobs.”