Word is out that President-elect Barack Obama will nominate Federal Reserve Bank President Timothy J. Geithner for Secretary of the Treasury. With stocks rising nearly 500 points, Wall Street seems to be welcoming the news. So color me suspicious.
Geithner was a deputy under Bill Clinton's Treasury Secretary Lawrence Summers, a right-wing deregulationist. Geithner himself has been at the heart of the big bank bailout, engineering the rescue of Bear Sterns for which the US taxpayers are out $29 Billion.
Three Blind Mice
By KAREN TUMULTY AND MASSIMO CALABRESI
The largest government bailout in U.S. history was born before dawn on Sept. 17, when Federal Reserve Chairman Ben Bernanke woke up at 6 a.m., checked his BlackBerry and saw the very thing he had dreaded: the futures market in free fall. Bernanke, Treasury Secretary Henry Paulson and New York Fed president Timothy Geithner had spent the past year staving off one disaster after another, for the most part working behind the scenes. Earlier in the month, they had let investment bank Lehman Brothers slide into oblivion and then ushered another, Merrill Lynch, into the arms of Bank of America. Just the night before, the trio had wrapped up a deal to rescue insurance giant American International Group and gone to bed praying it would halt the panic and worrying it wouldn't. It didn't. [Time: More...]
This is not the change I was hoping for...
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