Kashkari to oversee $700 billion bailout

He's now the $700 billion man.

On Monday, Neel Kashkari, 35, an assistant secretary of the Treasury, was named interim head of the Office of Financial Stability by Treasury Secretary Henry Paulson. The office will run the $700 billion financial bailout program signed into law Friday.

The former Goldman Sachs vice president came to Washington in 2006 to be a senior adviser to Paulson, the Goldman CEO who had been named Treasury secretary.

But Kashkari's introduction to Washington was in 1990 when he came with his father, who had won a presidential award for helping get water supplies into 10 African villages.

"Neel was with me, and that had an impression on him," says the senior Kashkari, Chaman, who spoke to USA TODAY in a phone interview. He and his wife, Sheila, still live in Stow, Ohio, where their son grew up. "He was moved by the dazzle of the White House and all of that."

The senior Kashkari landed in the U.S. from India 42 years ago through a Christian missionary group that helped him enroll in the University of Detroit. A year later his wife joined him. He says he came with the promise that he was going to "use technology to eradicate hunger and poverty in the world."

Now, his son is the point person on an attempt to eradicate a credit crisis that has reverberated in markets around the world. He must implement the bailout that he helped Paulson devise in recent weeks. The senior Kashkari says his son brings an intense sense of organization to the job.

"When he does anything, if you ask him to make an electric car or ask him to plan an outing to Niagara Falls, he is so meticulous," says his father. "He has the power of organization. He immediately knows who he needs for a job. ... Whatever he does, he puts his heart and soul into it."

Kashkari grew up tight-knit family that made trips back to India every few years. Education was valued: His father has a doctorate in electrical engineering, his sister is a doctor of infectious disease and his mother is a retired pathologist.

After studying engineering at the University of Illinois, where he met his wife, Minal, he worked for three years at TRW on NASA projects before enrolling in Wharton School of Business to get an MBA in finance.

In the transcript of a Sept. 19 conference of the American Enterprise Institute, he talks about some of the philosophical conflicts he's faced recently about market intervention — and will face even more in his new job.