Geithner Going?

It is now all over the Internet that with the posturing of Congress and the President on the AIG bailouts, Timothy Geithner may resign given the revelation that he approved the bonus payments. Of course, the bigger news is the once-secret, tens of billions of dollars worth of payments to the counterparties that gambled with AIG on the credit default swaps that you and I have made through the Federal Reserve and the Federal Government, which is part of the reason that the Fed overtly announced quantitative easing (i.e., money-printing) today, as predicted here as soon as the Bank of England did the same thing recently. However, we should at least be grateful that the intelligentsia such as you and me understand the extent of the real scandal, and that for public consumption, a simple story can crystallize justifiable outrage but that stems from a more complex story.

In any case, EBR takes pride in joining with a few others in the media in opposing the Geithner nomination from the start. Here is our (brief) follow-up post from January 14 in "Geithner Must Go (Not Arrive):

The New York Times continues to push to make the appointment of Mr. Timothy Geithner appear inevitable. Its latest writeup is titled, "Geithner's Skill May Trump Tax Issue".

There is something wrong with this title. What is wrong is that everything important that Mr. Geithner has been involved with in the past year has failed. So where is the skill?

There is a howler in the Times article. What do you make of this part of it?

"On Oct. 17, at a New York hotel, Mr. Obama and Mr. Geithner met for an hour and talked about policy and personal matters, according to accounts of the session. . .""Obama advisers say the candidate “fell in love” with Mr. Geithner, in the words of one, while a Geithner associate said Mr. Geithner reported being “smitten” with Mr. Obama. “They both have that kind of quiet confidence in their demeanor,” the associate said."

DoctoRx here. "Fell in love" and "smitten"? Is this Brokeback Mountain come to the Potomac?

In any case, Mr. Geithner is a failure at his current job and a tax cheat. For him to become Treasury Secretary would be bad for the economy. It doesn't matter whether Mr. Obama loves him or how many Senators rally round him.

Mr. Geithner is now a failure in his current job, which includes preventing embarrassment to his boss and to the US of A. To paraphrase Senator Grassley, he should fall on his metaphorical sword and either work at State or find work at a large complex financial institution.


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