A depressing description of how Wall Street bought the Congress and the White House for pennies on the dollar:
…the real bonus turned out to be Treasury secretary Tim Geithner, who came up through the ranks as part of the bipartisan Robert Rubin–Hank Paulson–Citigroup–Goldman Sachs cabal. Geithner, a government-and-academe man from way back, never really worked on Wall Street, though he once was offered a gig as CEO of Citigroup, which apparently thought he did an outstanding job as chairman of the New York Fed, where one of his main tasks was regulating Citigroup — until it collapsed into the yawning suckhole of its own cavernous ineptitude, at which point Geithner’s main job became shoveling tens of billions of federal dollars into Citigroup, in an ingeniously structured investment that allowed the government to buy a 27 percent share in the bank, for which it paid more than the entire market value of the bank. If you can’t figure out why you’d pay 100-plus percent of a bank’s value for 27 percent of it, then you just don’t understand high finance or high politics.
It’s long, but read the whole thing.
Seriously, Rand, you gotta read Ron Suskind’s “Confidence Men” to find out that the country has been run these past 3 years, not from the Comintern but from the Harvard University Faculty Senate, which in some ways is far worse. Remember what WFB said about prefering being governed by the first 100 name in the Cambridge phone directory rather than by the Harvard Faculty?
Yeah, yeah, Suskind has his journalista biases and maybe you don’t share his love for Elizabeth Warren, Full Professor. But the missed opportunity was to put, not those silly Occupy protestors in charge but none other than Paul Volcker, a Democrat yes, but the fellow who engineered the economic turnaround in the early 1980’s that lead to the Longest Economic Expansion Ever.
Yeah, yeah, Reagan and everything, if there is anything to credit Mr. Reagan is that he was willing to “stay the course” through the bitter medicine Mr. Volcker was dispensing until it kicked in.
So the Path Not Taken that Mr. Obama had faced, according to Suskind, was not anything Occupy is agitating for. Rather, it was the tough love approach of Paul Volcker vs the Don’t Worry Be Happy of that wacky former Harvard President that Mr. Obama put in charge of things.
There is a lot not to like about Occupy, but again, maybe it is like that Star Trek episode, Occupy had the right idea sacrificing itself in that shuttlecraft explosion but they didn’t have enough power behind what they are doing . . .
This is similar to the way the UK Government bought a 73% share in Royal Bank of Scotland for £45 billion, when if they had waited a week or two they could have got it for a nominal £1. To make this decision worse, bailing out RBS rather than letting it collapse and picking up the pieces saddled the (now state-owned) bank with billions of pounds in bonus payments too – payments to the people who caused the mess in the first place.