cameracollector is offline cameracollector Post #1  February 11,2009, 12:54pm
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I'm furious with the kid-glove treatment of Wall Street. So is Maureen Dowd, only she says it a lot better. It's time to kick some high-flyingfinancial b u t t to the curb. Dowd's op-ed is below (emphasis is mine):


---------------------------------------------


So much for the savior-based economy.


Tim Geithner, the learned and laconic civil servant and financial engineer, did not sweep in and infuse our shaky psyches with confidence. For starters, the 47-year-old’s voice kept cracking.


Escorting us over the rickety, foggy bridge from TARP to Son of TARP by way of TALF — don’t ask — Geithner did not, as the president said when he drew on the wisdom of Fred Astaire, inspire us to pick ourselves up, dust ourselves off and start all over again.


The Obama crowd is hung up on the same issues that the Bush crew was hung up on last September: Which of the potentially $2 or $3 trillion in toxic assets will the taxpayers buy and what will we pay for them?


Despite the touting, the Treasury chief unveiled a plan short on illumination, recrimination, fine points and foreclosure closure. The Dow collapsed on its fainting couch as Sports Illustrated swimsuit models rang the closing bell.


It wasn’t only that Geithner’s own tax history — and his time as head of the New York Fed when all the bad stuff was happening on Wall Street, and when he left with nearly a half-million in severance — makes him a dubious messenger for the president’s pledge to keep the haves from further betraying the have-nots.


It wasn’t only that Americans’ already threadbare trust has been ripped by Hank Paulson’s mumbo-jumbo and the Democrats’ bad judgment in accessorizing the stimulus bill with Grammy-level “bling, bling,” as the R.N.C. chairman, Michael Steele, called it.


The problem is that the “lost faith” that Geithner talked about in his announcement Tuesday cannot be restored as long as the taxpayers who are funding these wayward banks don’t have more control.


Geithner is not even requiring the banks to lend in return for the $2 trillion his program will try to marshal, mostly by having the Fed print money out of thin air, thereby diluting our money, or borrowing more from China. (When, exactly, can China foreclose on us and start sending us toxic toys again?)


There’s a weaselly feel to the plan, a sense that tough decisions were postponed even as President Obama warns about our “perfect storm of financial problems.” The outrage is going only one way, as we pony up trillion after trillion.


Geithner is coddling the banks, setting it up so that either we’ll have to pay the banks inflated prices for poison assets or subsidize investors to pay the banks for poison assets.


As Steve Labaton and Ed Andrews wrote in The Times on Tuesday, Geithner won an internal battle with David Axelrod and other Obama aides who wanted to impose pay caps on every employee at institutions taking the bailout and set stricter guidelines on how federal money is spent. Geithner prevailed over those who wanted to kick out negligent bank executives and wipe out shareholders at institutions receiving aid.


In a move that would have made his mentor, Robert Rubin, proud, Geithner beat back the populists and protected the economic royalists. The new plan offers insufficient meddling with Wall Street, even though Wall Street shows no sign that the hardscrabble economy has pierced its Hermès-swathed world.


Wells Fargo, for instance, which has leeched $25 billion in bailout money, bought an inadvertently hilarious full-page ad in The Times to whinge about the junkets to Las Vegas and elsewhere it was forced to cancel because of public outrage. (The ad in The Times on Sunday could have cost up to $200,000, which may count as a bailout for our industry.)


“Okay, time out. Something doesn’t feel right,” John Stumpf, the president and chief executive of Wells Fargo wrote in an open letter defending their two decades of four-day employee recognition “events.” Calling them junkets or boondoggles is “nonsense,” he protested, adding about his employees: “This recognition energizes them.”


In this economy, simply having a job should energize them.


Geithner is wrong. The pay of all the employees in bailed-out banks, not just top executives, should be capped. And these impervious, imperial suits who squander taxpayers’ money after dragging the country over the cliff should all be fired — preferably when they come to D.C. on Wednesday in a phony show of populism on Amtrak and the shuttle to testify before Barney Frank.


Wall Street cannot be trusted to change its culture. Just look at the full-page ads that Bank of America (which got $45 billion) and Citigroup (which got $50 billion) are plastering in newspapers, lavishing taxpayer money on preening prose.


We don’t want our money spent, as Citigroup did, to pat itself on the back “as we navigate the complexities together.” Bank of America cannot get back our trust by spending more of our cash to assure us that it’s “getting to work” on getting back our trust.


Just get back to work and start repaying us.


 
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dito is offline dito Post #2  February 11,2009, 2:47pm
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Surprisingly enough I agree with most of cc's article.


I think you may also like this video cc: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vixTz7tpF_w
 
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cameracollector is offline cameracollector Post #3  February 11,2009, 3:06pm
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dito,482777 wrote :

Surprisingly enough I agree with most of cc's article.


I think you may also like this video cc: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vixTz7tpF_w
I hope that noise I just heard wasn't the world ending....
 
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cameracollector is offline cameracollector Post #4  February 11,2009, 3:07pm
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and btw, dito, I'd like to smack Geithner and say "what are you thinking???"
 
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dito is offline dito Post #5  February 11,2009, 3:26pm
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I wish Obama would ask him to resign.
 
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cameracollector is offline cameracollector Post #6  February 11,2009, 3:53pm
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who would you choose to replace him?


btw, my dad went to graduate school with Hank Paulson (and thinks he screwed up)....
 
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dito is offline dito Post #7  February 11,2009, 4:23pm
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Paulson screwed up bad. I like Peter Schiff, Jim Rogers, Ron Paul. Pretty much anyone from the Austrian school of economics.
 
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cameracollector is offline cameracollector Post #8  February 11,2009, 4:46pm
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Hmm. And I thought the Chicago School was radical. Have their theories been put into practice anywhere?
 
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dito is offline dito Post #9  February 11,2009, 4:53pm
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cameracollector,483029 wrote :

Hmm. And I thought the Chicago School was radical. Have their theories been put into practice anywhere?
To the best of my knowledge not that I am aware of. But if I remember correctly they have predicted every recession and depression a little bit before the great depression. Have you seen the Peter Schiff was right video?
 
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