Jeff Peek

Jeffrey Peek is a finance industry executive. He headed CIT Group from 2003 until it was reorganized following the 2008 financial crisis.

Career Peek joined CIT after being turned down as a potential CEO from Merrill Lynch, where he had been employed for almost 20 years, and a 19-month spell at Credit Suisse Group. He was directly responsible for expanding CIT into lending subprime mortgages and student loans. This made the company vulnerable to changes in the market, and after the 2008 financial crisis, the group plunged into debt. CIT lost £5 billion in the nine quarters up to fall 2009 under Peek's leadership. He resigned following an announcement from bondholders that the company would need to restructure $31 billion of debt. Following his resignation from CIT, the company's shares dropped by 85%, putting it close to bankruptcy. He was replaced by former Merrill Lynch CEO John Thain. He was criticised for expanding CIT too quickly, but colleagues think he may have simply suffered from bad timing. However, BI also said that "in going down this path, he was no different than many of his fellow chief executives on Wall Street."

In 2015, Peek was hired by Bank of America as an executive vice chairman. Their son, Andrew Peek, studied at Princeton, Harvard, Johns Hopkins and the University of Texas at Austin, is a veteran of the US Army, and has worked for the Heritage Foundation and for two Republican US Senators and one Republican Congressman. He briefly served in each of the Trump administrations; as part of the State Department during Trump's first term, and as an advisor at the NSC during Trump's second term.