Buttigieg and McKinsey

So, Mayor Buttigieg, candidate for President, has discovered (1) that his campaign had surged into the top rank and that (2) he will be taking a lot flack from others who until then had happily ignored him and his disclosures.

Those others discovered that he spent three years as an employee of the infamous business consultancy McKinsey. McKinsey is a partnership founded in the 1920s by James O. McKinsey, who had the idea of applying cutting-edge accounting ideas to businesses.

Why is it infamous? Chiefly I think because its alums keep showing up in scandals, and eventually in federal penitentiaries. Jeffrey Skilling, for example, was a partner at McKinsey in the 1980s. Ken Lay then hired him to work at Enron, where he became associated with that energy derivatives' company's meteoric rise and fall.

Rajat Gupta, even more dramatically, was the managing director of McKinsey from 1994 to 2003, and was later convicted of insider trading.

After hemming and hawing for a time, Buttigieg gave in on releasing a list of the projects and clients on which and for which he had worked there. The other candidates' oppo-research teams have something to work with.

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