KEY POINTS:
A little-known 35-year-old engineering graduate, who spent just four years working in finance, has today been entrusted with saving the global banking industry from implosion - and handed US$700bn of taxpayer money to play with.
Neel Kashkari, a low-ranking official at the US Treasury, is to head the Office of Financial Stability n a body that may sound historic and august, but was in fact invented last week as part of the emergency bailout of Wall Street, and which amounts to little more than a giant hedge fund.
The bald, intense Indian-American will be in charge of investing hundreds of billions of dollars in the toxic mortgages that have gummed up banks' finances and caused the disastrous freezing of the credit markets.
Because nobody knows at this stage whether those mortgages have any value, nobody knows either if the US taxpayer could make a tidy profit, or lose all $700bn.
The difference between those two outcomes could be Mr Kashkari.
The son of Kashmiri immigrants to the US, he has been one of the most loyal and hard-working advisers to the Treasury Secretary Henry Paulson as the credit crisis has snowballed, but news of his dramatic elevation raised eyebrows across Washington.
He has worked in the capital for barely two years, one of a string of Goldman Sachs executives hired by Mr Paulson.
At times, the Treasury has looked like a branch office of the mighty investment bank.
Mr Paulson himself was chief executive of the company until he was lured into public office by the President George Bush, and a cabal of senior advisers came with him.
But even at Goldman Sachs, Mr Kashkari had a thin resume, joining only in 2002 in a career switch after attending Wharton business school.
He was never part of the inner circle at Goldman in New York, staying instead on the West Coast, where he advised on mergers and acquisitions among IT security companies.
He and his wife Minal still maintain a home in California, as well as one in Maryland.
Before he became one of the "masters of the universe", as the ambitious bankers of Wall Street are known, Mr Kashkari was headed towards becoming a master of the cosmos, doing important work for Nasa's space program.
Banking is not in his blood. Science is.
His father, Chapman, is a retired professor of engineering, and his mother Sheila is a pathologist.
It was to science that the young Neel Kashkari originally headed, taking a bachelor's and a master's in engineering at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, his home state's flagship public university.
His first major career was as a research and development investigator at a company called TRW in Redondo Beach, California, which had an illustrious history as a contractor to Nasa, creating several of its deep space satellites.
At TRW, Mr Kashkari helped develop technology for new space science missions such as the James Webb Space Telescope, which is due for launch in 2013 as a successor to the ageing Hubble telescope and which will go searching for light from the first stars formed after the Big Bang.
His parents told local reporters in Ohio, at the time of his Congressional confirmation into his Treasury post last year, that their ambitious son believed that finance needed more people who could bring scientific insights.
"We are so proud of him," Shelia Kashkari said then. "I pray for him to do the right thing."
With global finance facing a Big Bang of its own, Mr Kashkari was always at Mr Paulson's side as the Goldman cabal fought crisis after crisis.
They pulled all-nighters to try to rescue first the mortgage industry, then the investment bank Bear Stearns, then the mortgage finance giants Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, then Lehman Brothers and AIG, and now the entire financial system.
The bailout plan was in part Mr Kashkari's own brainchild, first mooted last year under the codename "Break the glass" to suggest it was a tool to be used only in an emergency.
Most recently, he was heavily involved in drafting last week's controversial legislation.
Tough as getting that through Congress might have been, his hard work is only just beginning.
- INDEPENDENT