Obama last Wednesday named Cyrus Amir-Mokri to be the assistant secretary of the Treasury for financial institutions, a very major post at the center of issues today over how to organize and regulate banks and other financial institutions.
Amir-Mokri has quite a collection of varied degrees in biochemistry, history and law.
The Treasury Department has 10 assistant secretaries. The assistant secretary for financial institutions coordinates regulations and legislation affecting Federal agencies that oversee or insure financial institutions and securities markets. As such, it is one of the most important posts in Washington in recent years when the regulation and oversight of banks has come front and center since the 2008 financial meltdown.
Although President George W. Bush named many Iranian-Americans to positions of similar rank, Obama did not do so until last week. Some think his reluctance to name Muslims in general stemmed from the frequency with which many on the far right insist that Obama himself is a foreign-born Muslim.
Amir-Mokri was born and reared in Tehran. His family brought him to the United States as a teenager in 1981, a period when many Iranian families were trying to get their teenaged sons out of Iran to avoid the wartime draft.
For one year, Amir-Mokri attended Wayland Academy, a college prep private school in Wisconsin, then started at Harvard, graduating in 1986 with a degree in biochemistry.
He then studied history at the University of Chicago, where he focused chiefly on diplomatic history and the history of the modern Middle East. His doctoral dissertation was on Iran’s constitutional revolution.
Amir-Mokri then entered the University of Chicago Law School, graduating in 1995 and practicing law afterward in Illinois and Chicago, including with the prominent firm of Skadden, Arps.
Most recently, Amir-Mokri has been senior counsel at the Commodity Futures Trading Corporation, which is the agency that oversees trading in commodity futures, including those of oil. In that position, he was one of those who advised on the drafting of the Dodd-Frank Act, the primary financial regulatory legislation that emerged from the Democratic Congress after the 2008 financial crisis.
Amir-Mokri has been active in the Iranian-American community. He served two terms as a director of the Iranian-American Bar Association. He was a founding member of the Iranian-American Political Action Committee, which supports Iranians running for public office. And he was one of the first board members of the Public Affairs Alliance of Iranian Americans (PAAIA).
Amir-Mokri must first be confirmed by the US Senate before he can take up his post. That is not expected to be a difficult hurdle.
