The Fed, Employer of Last Resort

How's this for sweet, sweet irony? The person who oversaw risk at Bear Stearns when it was driven into the ground for being overly risky has just landed a job at the New York Federal Reserve Bank of New York in charge of bank supervision.

Michael Alix, who was chief risk officer for Bear Stearns from 2006 until its demise earlier this year, will help oversee banks for the Fed in New York. He was appointed senior vice president in the Fed's Bank Supervision Group, reporting to William Rutledge, the group's head. Alix ran Bear's global credit risk management for the decade prior to become its chief risk officer.

Congratulations, Alix! We assume you'll do a heckuva job.

He should be well acquainted with this territory, having working at Merrill Lynch for eight years before joining Bear. Moreover, Alix be back under the same roof, rhetorically speaking, with the $30 billion in bad loans the government agreed to assume when it orchestrated the Bear sale to J.P. Morgan. Now he'll have a front row seat to watch them decline. So far, the mortgage portfolio has lost a little more than 10 percent of its value, to $26.8 billion.

It's an interesting pick for Rutledge. In March, before Bear went belly up, the Fed released a report with other international central banks that warned of the risks in banks taking on too much debt. Rutledge penned the introduction:

"In particular, some firms made strategic decisions to retain large exposures to super-senior tranches of collateralized debt obligations that far exceeded the firms' understanding of the risks inherent in such instruments, and failed to take appropriate steps to control or mitigate those risks."

What exactly are the hiring standards at the New York Fed, anyway? We have a resume or two they might like to see.