Chip Somodevilla/Getty ImagesThe Treasury Department building in Washington.After more than two years of long train rides and selling off more than $120 billion in assets, the chief investment officer of the Treasury Department’s bailout program is stepping down.
The official, Matt Pendo, will serve his last day on Friday. He will be succeeded by Charmian Uy, who joined the department last summer from Sunoco, where she was treasurer.
Leaving Treasury will mean the end of commuting to Washington from Connecticut, where Mr. Pendo’s wife and four children remained. Mr. Pendo, 49, took the 5:30 a.m. train from Pennsylvania Station in Manhattan every Monday, returning late in the week.
“The body and family can take only so much of that,” he said in an interview. He has no immediate plans, other than spending time with his family.
During his two-year tenure as chief investment officer, Mr. Pendo oversaw a substantial unwinding of financial lifelines given during the financial crisis, notably the complete sell-off of the Treasury’s holdings in the insurance giant American International Group.
“Matt is an exceptionally talented individual and served the taxpayers extraordinarily well,” Timothy G. Massad, the Treasury Department’s assistant secretary for financial stability, said in a statement.
A former investment banker who spent 25 years at Merrill Lynch and then Barclays, Mr. Pendo began working at Treasury in November of 2010, serving as deputy to his predecessor, David N. Miller. He was immediately thrust into the work of getting the government out of the many investments it had acquired in various rescue programs.
During his time as chief investment officer, Mr. Pendo oversaw the sale of the federal government’s 92 percent stake in A.I.G. over 19 months. The process yielded a profit of $22.7 billion to taxpayers.
Mr. Pendo also helped navigate Treasury’s exit from its investment in Chrysler, as well as setting up a way for the government to auction off its preferred stock holdings in the nation’s banks. Several of those exits yielded more than $1 billion in profit.
The government has begun to sell its shares in General Motors, and will completely unwind its stake by early next year. That will most likely generate a billion-dollar loss to taxpayers.
But Mr. Pendo said that he remained proud of his team’s work. “We had to figure out a balance between the speed of an exit and the return to taxpayers,” he said. “We tried to do the right thing.”