Our introduction to the Treasury Department official in charge of the $700 billion bailout fund -- Who will spend our $700 billion? Meet 35-year-old Neel Kashkari -- generated a lot of interest and commentary. Many of the comments have been negative and cover a wide range of fear and loathing, from cracks about Goldman Sachs (NYSE: GS) running the country and stealing all the money, to insults directed at Kashkari's lack of hair and ethnic background. (For the record, his family is from India, not Iran, and Neel is apparently a Hindu name, not a Muslim one, although I haven't found any definitive proof of his religious background.)

Looking around the web, I found lots of talk about Kashkari, including one curious comment at Huffington Post that Kashkari has a special arrangement with respect to his salary. Somehow, according to this commentator, Goldman Sachs is paying him billions of dollars to do his job. He will supposedly collect these riches when he steps down, presumably after having rendered super-secret services to the financial oligarchs who apparently own our country.

The writer of the comment offered no proof, and I have to admit that I'm a little skeptical (about the salary, not the oligarchy). But it did get me thinking about how much government officials are being paid to handle all this bailout money.

According to this Bloomberg report, Kashkari earned $738,000 in salary and bonus at Goldman before joining his former boss Hank Paulson at Treasury in July 2006. His title is now Assistant Secretary (Assistant Secretary of the Treasury for Financial Stability and Assistant Secretary of the Treasury for International Economics and Development, to be precise) and he is, obviously, a federal employee now. So he must earn the standard salary for an Assistant Secretary.

The first speech by bailout guru Neel Kashkari reveals that the $700 billion bailout plan to save the world is turning into a Wall Street WPA program (WSWPA). What a disappointment!

WSWPA started off by hiring a law firm -- Simpson Thatcher & Bartlett LLP! And it hired a consultant -- Ennis Knupp & Associates -- to help Kashkari evaluate which of 70 Wall Street firms will get their share of the gravy train. To be fair, Kashkari mentioned a voluntary program to invest in healthy banks -- but it sounds far from aggressive to me. So the U.S. is announcing its plans to dole out our tax dollars to enrich Wall Street firms while Britain has already taken action to shore up its banking system.

Perhaps disappointment with the glacial pace of U.S. response to this financial crisis helps explain the somewhat anemic stock market action. Futures had indicated a 6% rise; however, markets are currently up a relatively mild 4.2%. I find it interesting that the administration is choosing to use Kashkari's discussion of the nuts and bolts of a government contract for Wall Street as the best way to lead us out of this financial crisis.

November 4th cannot come too soon.

Peter Cohan is President of Peter S. Cohan & Associates. He also teaches management at Babson College and edits The Cohan Letter.

His name is not exactly familiar and his official title is a bit much -- Interim Assistant Secretary of the Treasury for Financial Stability and Assistant Secretary of the Treasury for International Economics and Development -- but 35-year-old Neel Kashkari is now one of the most powerful people in the global economy. As the head of the new Office of Financial Stability, it's his job to start spending the $700 billion Congress approved to stabilize the financial system.

As some commentators enjoy pointing out, Kashkari is a former rocket scientist, having earned Bachelor's and Master's degree in engineering from the University of Illinois and worked as a mechanical engineer at TRW, where he developed latches for the the Next Generation Space Telescope. He left engineering for finance, parlaying an MBA from Wharton into a gig at Goldman Sachs (NYSE: GS), where he rose to Vice President, specializing in information technology investment banking.

So there's little doubt that he's a smart and hard-working guy. And in the current administration, that's a great accomplishment.

But the question isn't whether Kashkari is smart. The question is whether he has any idea how to use all that money to stabilize the global financial markets. And a quote from Kashkari I dug up does not inspire confidence. In September, at the right-wing American Enterprise Institute, Kashkari reportedly declared, "I'm a free-market Republican."

It's no surprise, of course, that a Bush administration official would describe himself as a free-market Republican. But it does suggest that Kashkari may have trouble figuring out how to restore confidence in those supposedly free markets.