Geithner - Bush as usual

Tim Geithner is proposing a banks bailout plan that is great for the banks while not making the banks pay for the damages they caused. Paulson is gone, what we get is a better organized Paulson plan. Thanks.

Geithner opposed removing the current management. This step is more symbolic than financial. In effect, it assumes that the management owns the bank and not, in reality, hired help that failed miserably and can be easily replaced by, clearly, better people.

The NYTimes says that "[h]e resisted those who wanted to dictate how banks would spend their rescue money." That is, we foot the bill but the abysmally faulty management gets to decide. That is a typical Republican position that assumes that management is God.

A $50 billion initiative enables millions of homeowners facing imminent foreclosure to renegotiate the terms of their mortgages is part of a $500 Billion. In other words, the real victims of the banks get barely 10% of the rescue plan. That sounds like a joke.

He will require all banks receiving bailout money from the government to submit plans that describing their steps to strengthen their lending programs and generally restrict them from using the money to acquire other banks until the government money is repaid. The real issue here is does Geithner builds in the power to monitor and intervene in case the banks deviate, which will surely happen immediately, from the fake plan.

To repeat the Republican mantra, Mr. Geithner worried that the plan would not work, and could become more expensive for taxpayers, if there were too much government involvement in the affairs of the companies. That's almost laughable. The government has to rescue the banks and the country because banks management failed, but we shouldn't be involved too much in running the banks. Did Geithner take logic 101 at school? Again, Bush voice is heard.

Geithner claims that the lessons of countries that forced banks to make loans and adopted other, more interventionist measures. Those strategies, according to Geithner, wound up costing more and undermining their governments’ credibility. That is simply a distortion of the record. Sweden, which is the closed example to the USA, nationalized the banks until they became profitable again, at which time, it sold the banks back to the private sector with a small profit.

Geither represents Wall Street in the Obama administration. His beliefs are identical to Bush's and he strongly favors the banks over the American people.

What a Change!