Goldman Sachs lobbyist is Geithner's chief of staff

GS was up to its eyeballs in the cdo's the sub-prime mess and lobbying against the regulations that might have prevented this.. They made a lucky bet and got out in time. Does that make them the folks we want controlling our government's response to this crisis. This guy was a lobbyist and was not just a guy in the background crunching numbers with no "problematic part of the financial system.

I'm not sure if you think you are defending Obama or you think that it somehow "moderate" to take this position.

 

I dislike the company because they are largely responsible for the mess we are in. Same thing with AIG. I'm not sure why you think they bear little if any responsibility for what happened. GS was in the center of the group that pushed for the deregulation of the financial markets that many --including moderates-- think led to this mess.

 

This is actually untrue, GS would make a pretty big profit with an AIG collapse

http://www.businessinsider.com/goldman-sachs-made-billions-shorting-aig-2009-3

 

Which scares me to some extent.....

 

We elected a President with very little experience.

 

True, and it definitely shows.

 

Absolutely - but like Congressional positions, President isn't a position of technical expertise. It's more a position of negotiation, intuition, leadership, etc. You're not expected to be an expert in any given field.

Treasury Secretary is the opposite. You're supposed to be an expert in one thing. Putting a Krugman in charge of the Treasury would be like putting a theoretical computer scientist in the position of building a new device. Theory is built around models and serves as a useful guide to the real world, but is very different from it.

It's funny that people have problems with both people from the private financial sector (GS) and people who worked in the public sector their whole lives (Geithner). It's like knowing anything about real world finance is a bad thing - this reminds me of the Bush admnistration's war on intelligence.

 

Still way too enthralled by the whole big bank thing-- that they are the only ones who know. "Trust us. It is too complicated for you peons and economists and politicians-- anyone who is not a top investment banker".

 

An interesting article from Ariana Huffington re the idea that only the investment bankers know. Obama is only surrounding himself with the same banker insiders and not listening to other economists and even bankers.
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A series of recent meetings with members of Barack Obama's economic team (including running into Larry Summers on my way to an appointment in the West Wing, leading to a spirited back-and-forth that made me feel like I was back at Cambridge, debating the smartest kid in the class), left me with a pair of indelible impressions:

1) These are all good people, many of them brilliant, working incredibly hard with the best of intentions to solve the country's financial crisis.

2) They are operating on the basis of an outdated cosmology that places banks at the center of the economic universe.

Talking about our financial crisis with them is like beaming back to the 2nd century and discussing astronomy with Ptolemy. Just as Ptolemy was convinced we live in a geocentric universe -- and made the math work to "prove" his flawed theories -- Obama's senior economic team is convinced we live in a bank-centric universe, and keeps offering its versions of "epicycles" and "eccentric circles" to rationalize their approach to the bailout. And because, like Ptolemy, they are really smart, they are really good at rationalizing.

It's easy to get lost debating the complexity of each new iteration of each new bailout, but the devil here is not in the details -- but in the obsolete cosmology.

If you believe the universe is revolving around the earth -- when, in fact, it isn't -- all the good intentions in the world, and all the endless nights spent coming up with plans like Tim Geithner's Public-Private Investment Program will be for naught.

The successive bailout plans have been frustrating to many observers (yours truly included), but when you realize how fully the economic team is mired in a bank-centric universe, all the moves suddenly make perfect sense.

Here is one example. Everybody agrees on the paramount importance of freeing up credit for individuals and businesses. In a bank-centric universe, the solution was a bailout plan giving hundreds of billions to banks. It failed because, instead of using the money to make loans, the banks "are keeping it in the bank because their balance sheets had gotten so bad," as the president himself acknowledged on Jay Leno. As a result, the administration, again according to the president, had to "set up a securitized market for student loans and auto loans outside of the banking system" in order to "get credit flowing again."

But think of all the time we wasted while the first scheme predictably failed. And how much better off we'd now be if we had provided credit directly through credit unions or small healthy community banks or, as happened during the Depression, through a new entity like the Reconstruction Finance Corporation.

Luckily, there is a plethora of economic Galileos out there who recognize that the old bank-centric cosmology is just plain wrong. But while Joseph Stiglitz, Simon Johnson, Jeffrey Sachs, Nassim Taleb, Niall Ferguson, Paul Krugman, etc. are not being imprisoned for life for their heretical views -- they are also not being listened to. Which is really surprising for an administration that has prided itself on a "team of rivals" approach.

Worse, as the fundamental flaw in the administration's cosmology becomes more and more evident, the economic team around the president is closing ranks. Even David Axelrod, once the administration's champion of a more skeptical view of a bank-centric universe, appears to be peering through the Geithner-Summers telescope.

Back in February, he crossed swords with Geithner, arguing for executive pay caps. But there he was on Sunday, whiffing on a pro-populist softball offered up by Fox News' Chris Wallace, who asked: "When taxpayers are putting up most of the money and taking more of the risk, why would the Obama administration allow some of these executives to get even richer?"

Axelrod's answer? "On some of these programs, we're asking financial companies to come in and help solve this problem by providing more lending, by buying up toxic assets and so on. We don't want to create disincentives and undermine the program."

"Asking" them? Aren't we, in fact, bribing them with massive capital infusions and loan guarantees? That's what being surrounded by a group of modern day Ptolemys will do to a person.

Of course, it's less of a surprise that Geithner and Summers believe in bank-centrism -- they're both creatures of it. Which is why it wasn't a shock when it was reported this weekend that Summers had received $5.2 million for advising a hedge fund last year, or that he received hundreds of thousands of dollars in speaking fees from some of the very banks -- including J.P. Morgan, Citigroup, and Goldman Sachs -- that have been on the receiving end of billions in taxpayers money. Billions that have come with very few strings attached -- and almost no transparency.

I am in no way suggesting there is anything corrupt about this or any quid pro quo involved. It's just that in a bank-centric universe, funneling no-strings-attached money to too-big-to-fail banks is the logical thing to do.

So is arguing that the banking crisis is just a liquidity problem rather than an insolvency one, as Geithner continues to do (and if the stress tests come back declaring Citi solvent, it will be high time to start stress testing the stress testers).

In a bank-centric universe, it's also no surprise that "mark-to-market" accounting rules, in which banks have to calculate and report their assets based on what those assets are actually worth, instead of what they'd like them to be worth, are being abandoned. A good name for the reworked accounting standards would be mark-to-fantasy, because that's basically what balance sheets will be under these new rules. Of course, to a true believer in bank-centrism, the problem with mark-to-market is that it's not good for the banks. It's the accounting equivalent of Galileo's telescope.

Last week at the G-20 meeting, Gordon Brown proclaimed that "the old Washington consensus is over." But when it comes to attacking the financial crisis, the zombie Wall Street/Washington consensus that has everything in America orbiting around the banks is still the order of the day.

The longer bank-centrism is the dominant cosmology in the Obama administration -- and the longer it takes to switch to a plan that reflects a cosmology in which the American people are the center of the universe and are deemed too-big-to-fail -- the greater the risk that the economic crisis will be more prolonged than necessary. And the greater the suffering the crisis will continue to cause....



http://www.huffingtonpost.com/arianna-huffington/the-obama-economic-teams_b_183744.html