Not surprisingly, the face of U.S. Treasury Secretary Hank Paulson’s financial rescue plan is to be Neel Kashkari, a former banker from Paulson’s alma mater – Goldman Sachs – and a man whose deep understanding of the powers of the bare pate, it seems, is growing apace. What we do find surprising, however, is that the man entrusted to deal with the global credit crisis at breakneck speed is only 35 years old. Just who is this (recently) unmasked man?

Minutes before Neel Kashkari's public debut as the chief of the U.S. Treasury's financial rescue plan, he sat in a hotel lobby in Washington, unrecognized by many of the international bankers gathering to hear him speak.

By the time Kashkari finished his 21-minute address yesterday, laying out Treasury's first concrete details of the $700 billion bailout, a swarm of television cameras and reporters followed him out the door.

In less than two weeks, the 35-year-old former Goldman Sachs Group Inc. banker has risen from obscurity to center stage in the U.S. financial crisis. He has been given extraordinary latitude, and not much time, to set up an organization and procedures for carrying out the Treasury's counteroffensive on the market meltdown.

Kashkari and Treasury Secretary Henry Paulson are "doing this on a wing and prayer, and it's all happening quickly," said Paul Light, a professor at New York University who studies the federal bureaucracy. "There is such pressure to get it done that I think all rules are out."

The Treasury is poised to announce plans today to invest about $125 billion in nine major banks, according to people briefed on the matter yesterday.

As head of the new Office of Financial Stability during the final months of George W. Bush's presidency, Kashkari is responsible for overseeing the selection of private contractors for Treasury's Troubled Asset Relief Program, hiring permanent government employees for the effort and setting standards that will govern how conflicts of interest are managed.

"A program as large and complex as this would normally take months -- or even years -- to establish," Kashkari said in his speech yesterday. "We don't have months or years."

Kashkari's appointment earlier this month drew comment from Wall Street veterans and industry observers because of his youth, his relative inexperience with markets and his ties to Goldman, where Paulson had been chief executive officer.

"It was unfortunate that it was yet another Goldman Sachs person taking the helm," said Michael Greenberger, a former official at the Commodity Futures Trading Commission and now a professor at University of Maryland School of Law. "Essentially it appears that he is turning to the very financial institutions that led to the problems to fix the problems."

Kashkari worked in Goldman's San Francisco office on mergers and acquisitions in the information-technology industry. He reported Goldman paid him $738,000 in salary and bonus before he joined Treasury in July 2006 as a senior adviser to Paulson, according to his federal financial disclosure form.

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