Undoubtedly with plans to go back to Morgan Stanley...

Feb. 10 (Bloomberg) -- Federal Reserve Governor Kevin Warsh, who was one of Chairman Ben S. Bernanke’s closest financial-crisis advisers before becoming the only governor to question the expansion of record monetary stimulus in November, resigned after five years at the central bank. Warsh, 40, a former investment banker who was the youngest-ever Fed governor when then-President George W. Bush appointed him in 2006, will leave “on or around March 31,” he said in a letter today to President Barack Obama that was released by the Fed in Washington. His term would have run through January 2018. Bloomberg's Peter Cook reports. (Source: Bloomberg)

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Warsh resigns from the Fed

Source - Bloomberg

As a freshman at Stanford University in California, Warsh pestered political-science professor David Brady to attend a senior seminar that wasn’t open to first-year students, Brady said in 2009.

“He was so persistent,” said Brady, who became his thesis adviser at Stanford. “He said he would get the best grade in the class, and he did.”

After graduating from Stanford, Warsh earned a law degree from Harvard University but never practiced, opting instead to join Morgan Stanley in New York, where he worked in the mergers and acquisitions department from 1995 to 2002. He then joined the White House, advising on policies including the government- chartered home-finance companies Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac.

Warsh was an architect of the terms the Treasury dictated to nine of the biggest U.S. banks in October 2008 in return for a $125 billion injection of government funds. He played a central role in negotiating the sale of the ailing Wachovia Corp., mediating a takeover fight that erupted between Citigroup Inc. and Wells Fargo & Co.

Intensified Crisis

Days before Lehman Brothers Holdings Inc.’s bankruptcy in 2008 intensified the crisis, a Fed staff member e-mailed Warsh to say she hoped “we don’t have to protect” some Lehman debt holders, according to documents released by the Financial Crisis Inquiry Commission. Warsh replied an e-mail 30 minutes later that “I hope we dont (sic) protect anything!”

In January 2009, Warsh was passed over for the presidency of the New York Fed in favor of Dudley, a former Goldman Sachs Group Inc. economist and leading advocate of the Fed’s stimulus that’s been dubbed QE2 by investors for a second round of quantitative easing.

Warsh has served as the Fed’s representative to the Group of 20 and the Board of Governors’ emissary to emerging and advanced economies in Asia. He also managed Fed operations and personnel as the governor assigned to administration.

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