Feb 10 2009
Boy, What a Relief!
Treasury Secretary Tim Geithner held a long awaited news conference today. His nomination to the position in October sparked a nearly five hundred point surge in the Dow. However, his first appearance in his official capacity had a nearly one hundred and eighty degree impact as the Dow fell about three hundred and eighty points. I have no doubt that he is an intelligent man, which makes his excuse for not paying thousands of dollars of taxes because his use of TurboTax didn’t tell him he owed them a lame excuse at best. He came to the Treasury Department form the position of president of The Federal Reserve Bank of New York. Is it unreasonable to assume that he has been critically aware of the banking industry’s problems long before taking office? Yet, he was unable to give any definitive indication of what the Obama team is going to do with the second half of the first $700 billion dollar bank bailout. Don’t worry, your money is safe with us and whatever we do with it will be just fine. We’ll get back to you. Great!
Democrats blame Republicans and visa versa. No oversight from who? The evil Bush, of course. I could have sworn that the crisis came to a head during the last two years and who had Congressional oversight? The point really is everybody screwed up. Very few in Congress can be trusted and the market reflected that today. Special interest groups/lobbyists influence both side of the isle but for the President to stand in front of the nation and say that the Senate passed bill had no earmarks is absurd.
However, perhaps even more absurd was a question posed in the highly scripted news conference leading with something to the effect of, “if you can only successfully get a few Republicans to agree on something so easy as giving money back to taxpayers and creating jobs, how are you going to do when the really hard things like health care reform and the like come up?” It is absolutely the first time ever creating a $826 billion dollar bill paid for with funny money that doesn’t exist could be characterized as easy. If this is really a no brainer, and it absolutely isn’t, than we are in very big trouble.
