Regrettably, I’m with DeFazio.
But at this point, I don’t believe it is because Geithner is a bad or terrible person; I simply think that despite his work ethic, his experience is too narrow to rethink the economy to the depth that we need.

Ditto Summers.

BTW: A year ago, Google CEO Eric Schmidt gave a speech at the New American Foundation that tied together economic opportunities in new ‘green’ energy, a new energy grid, and new technologies, services, and businesses.

There are TONS of potential economic opportunities for the US, but not until accounting rules, banking regulations, and corporate frameworks are thoroughly revised.

Geithner and Summers aren’t in a good position to fundamentally re-think the things that need to be revised.

If I could give one analogy, it would be Apple Computer.

After rewriting code for generations of their Operating System (OS), they boldly decided to move to UNIX-based OS for their OS X. Every Apple OS that I’ve used since the new UNIX-based OS X has been sensationally good.

That was gutsy of Apple; they could have lost the company.
They threw out years of work, and started over.

I’m not generally one to ‘throw the baby out with the bathwater’, but we cannot afford one more unproductive Enron, WorldCom, Global Crossing, or TARP disaster.

Given the degree of fraud and theft in the current system, to say nothing of things so complex that people don’t understand the processes in play, it’s time to fundamentally redesign.

Geithner and Summers have so much invested in the current system that they can’t possibly be well-equipped to address the kinds of changes that we really need.

What is the over/under on the amount of time it will take Joe Lieberman to show up on Fox News to comment on the HCR bill presented by Reid et al. this afternoon? I need to calibrate my narcissism clock to standard time.

Another money quote: Geithner wouldn’t answer whether the credit default swaps AIG and the Fed paid off to Goldman Sachs were naked CDSs. DeFazio says he believes they were naked swaps, which never should have been paid.

Mel Watt’s feet sprouted today, disappointing me terribly, but I’m happy to slide deFazio into the slot Mel held. Go deFazio!

Kent was given the thankless assignment of trying to find something to peg health care reform to that would hold the Dem caucus together.

As such as Lieberliar and Ben Nelson have shown, that may have been an unachievable task. These two tools of Big Insurance will do anything to destroy healthcare reform because they are wholly owned by Big Insurance.

Kent’s a wonk and a bean counter and a chart guy and last time he was back in-state, no, he couldn’t walk on water….

ack, #5 was supposed to be in the earlier thread. sorry.

But while I’m here, I’m for dumping Summers Geithner and putting Elizabeth Warren and Krugman in.

DeFazio is right on the counts of firing Geithner/Summers.

AND he’s SPOT ON with how to fund a jobs bill.

GIT IT DONE!!!!

I’ts fun to read good news one in a while, thanks David for bringing to light!

I suppose that Summers and Geithner are intelligent but not smart. They are way in over their heads. The Peter Principle at work.

Dream’s over. They blew it.

;>)

A huge statement tonight – Peter DeFazio, a Democrat from Oregon and one of the chairs of the Populist Caucus in the House, just called for the firing of Timothy Geithner and Larry Summers, saying that Barack Obama’s economic team is failing him. He said that there’s a “growing sense” in the caucus that a new economic team committed to jobs and American workers is needed to replace the one primarily concerned with Wall Street

they must read the lake, I believe the lake is now a must read on the hill from all democrats, we are before the curve each and every time and we have been dead right each and every time

we need progressive economists, not those who stole from us in the first place, not anti regulatory, not “pro business” but pro middle class

it is the middle class that made us great and will get us out of this…they need to realise just that

Love the money quote.

You’re completely wrong. There’s no necessity of thinking outside the box. The U.S. economic problems are identical with what was wrought by the Gilded Age, and the 1930s cures should be reinstated.

Left you a query on your comment on the last thread.

So did I, Prairie.

David,
Thank you for this. Geithner and Summers have been in bed with the barons of Wall Street for too long. They’re coming up with some decent reform moves, but until we restore Glass-Steagall, I’m not optimistic.

Thanks,
Bob in AZ

Summers/Geithner are the economic equivalent of the Taliban. They have a belief, they select evidence in support of it, and refuse to consider evidence to the contrary because they just don’t believe it. Has nothing to do with intelligence nor smartness, but with faith.

Remember the old saying:

The Cossacks work for the Czar

I have a real problem with people who won’t even consider that they might be wrong. Being stubborn is no way to run a gov’t……. Bush was living proof of that. Of course, he wasn’t intelligent or smart either.

Yessireebob. Ya don’t think O choose S/G because O didn’t think the same way they did? Dya know Chicago School? Where O taught?

I must admit I was late to the game of recognizing economic belief demagogues. Well, at least among Ds; I recognized it in the Rs way back. But my economics views have always been tempered by evidence, and it took me quite some time to realize that other economists were no so constituted.

Great comment!
Is there a site where we can find out how much Big Pharma is paying Lieberlier’s wife so John Q. Citizen can understand where Lieberman is coming from when he is against any change in healthcare reform

O’Donnell asks Arkansas Lt Gov if he’ll primary Blanche Lincoln. He punts.

Glass-Steagal, repealed by the Gramm-Leach-Bailey act of 1999, under Democrat Bill Clinton.

On November 4th, the final bill resolving the differences was passed by the Senate 90–8, and by the House 362–57. This legislation (whose voting margins, if repeated, would easily have overcome any Presidential veto) was signed into law by Democratic President Bill Clinton on November 12, 1999.[16]

It took less than 10 years for the greed of the consolidated mega-banks to detonate their own financial system, but fortunately they control both political factions in the USA, who combined to bail them out to the tune of trillions of your dollars.

Voting for either of the parties that did this = voting against your own interests, sorry.

Duh!
I was referring to the comment by ThreadTheorist at #2 in my reply.
Have been away for a long time and just getting used to commenting again.
Sorry for the screw-up.

Hit the reply button and all will be clear.

OMG, how the mighty have fallen. O gave an interview to Chuck Todd.

Oh I missed the interview. Not surprised he punted, but he has got to be thinking about it.

Thanks. I think I’ve got it.

By Jove, you’ve got it!

Sounded like it. It was in the context of the next KO Free Clinic in Little Rock, which Lincoln couldn’t deign to show up, but which the Lt.Gov. was praising to high heavens.

DeFazio’s right. I have no regrets about saying it.

Here’s a link to an 8 part (or 9, or maybe 10 part before they’re all done with it) Magnum Opus of real news reporting on Casino Capitalism.

http://therealnews.com/t/index.php?option=com_content&task=view&id=33&Itemid=74&jumival=472

Somewhere in that whole ‘mother-of-all-video-economics-reports,’ the economic expert agrees. I’m not sure where, unfortunately….

He helped organize it.

they should never have been appointed…

when i saw these two wankers being appointed by Obama, my first thought was ‘he does NOT believe in the change he promised when he asked for our vote… he’s appointing the same so-called smartest guys in the room who were at the controls and created the mess we’re in… and now he’s putting them in charge of solving the problem…’

these two guys were involved in repealing Glass-Steagall, who didn’t want derivative regulated – one ran a hedge fund during the meltdown while the other was president of the NY Fed and oversaw / approved the TARP… these two are criminals who should have been arrested, NOT appointed to a president’s cabinet…

Here what life is like for your typical junior investment banker at Goldman Sachs, UBS, etc. This ran in the UK Independent. It’s never run in the US that I know of. I ran into the story while I was looking for info on the English soccer team I follow…

“American excess: A Wall Street trader tells all

Fine wines, lobster lunches and million-dollar salaries – life as a Wall Street shark was thrilling at first. But amid the extravagance, Philipp Meyer was sickened by a moral deficit at the heart of America’s financial system

“I’d been working for the bank for about five weeks when I woke up on the balcony of a ski resort in the Swiss Alps. It was midnight and I was drunk. One of my fellow management trainees was urinating onto the skylight of the lobby below us; another was hurling wine glasses into the courtyard.

Behind us, someone had stolen the hotel’s shoe-polishing machine and carried it into the room; there were a line of drunken bankers waiting to use it. Half of them were dripping wet, having gone swimming in all their clothes and been too drunk to remember to take them off. It took several more weeks of this before the bank considered us properly trained….I put on 45 pounds in my first year at the bank, and, as you might guess, it was not from eating McDonalds. Occasionally I ate stuff like sushi, but mostly it was steak. We went to the good places like Sparks, Peter Luger’s, and the Strip House. We tended to look down on chains like Morton’s and Ruth’s Chris-they were for car dealers or stock brokers, not traders. Regardless of where we ate, we ate in quantity. My standard strategy was to order half a dozen appetisers, plus a steak and lobster, plus a few desserts and much wine as I could drink, as long it was under a few hundred dollars a bottle. Followed by a digestif, typically a 30-year-old port. There’s not any way to justify this except to say I was trying to catch up to my colleagues. We would treat those restaurants like Roman vomitoriums. And it wasn’t the food so much as the wine. Being a junior employee, I couldn’t really order bottles that cost more than a few hundred dollars, but the senior guys could get nicer stuff – Opus One, Chateau Latour. As long as we were out with a client, the bank paid. I remember being stunned the first time I saw a dinner bill for ten grand. But that was just the beginning.

What it boiled down to was austerity for everyone else and rampant consumption for ourselves. I never saw anyone literally set fire to money, but I did drink most of a bottle of 1983 Margaux ($2,000).

The mornings after, with our thousand-dollar hangovers, my colleagues in corporate finance would set up deals and make a few hundred factory workers redundant. I helped build derivatives that funnelled income to offshore holding companies so rich people and big corporations didn’t have to pay taxes. We had lawyers on retainer in the Cayman Islands and Jersey – a quick phone call and it was all set, no more taxes. My guilt from doing this became so intense that on a whim I once went to a protest against the World Bank. I got sprayed with a little pepper gas and it felt good….”

http://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/americas/american-excess–a-wall-street-trader-tells-all-1674614.html

Read what I posted, then read the rest of the linked article over and over until you understand every corrupt act of American corporate kleptocracy is intentional.

they should never have been appointed…

It is difficult to say who is more culpable in this whole mess: Geithner and Summers and their Wall Street-loving ways, or Obama who appointed them.

In a word: Spitzer.

Christ, the guy couldn’t even manage his OWN fucking taxes. He never should have been hired in the first place.

This is just wrong.

To say that they’re in over their heads suggests that they don’t understand the game they’re playing – that they don’t have the tools to do so.

They understand just fine how the system works and who benefits from keeping it the way it is.
They believe that the system deserves to survive and those that benefit from it to prosper.
And they’re willing to apply their considerable abilities (especially in the case of Summers) to assure that it remains relatively unchanged.

Don’t confuse malfeasance with incompetence.

By the way, I agree with DeFazio.

It boggles the mind that some people refuse to accept that other people measure success by a different yardstick.

Geithner, Summers, Bernanke just seamlessly transfered trillions of dollars from the middle class pockets into the off shore coffers of Banksters and shareholders.

If accomplishing the greatest heist in world history, and perpetuating the most incredible ponzi scheme ever is accomplished by stupid people, then I am certain you fit the bill for a perfect candidate to buy a bridge I got to sell.

This Administration, much as Clintons is a stable of smart, audacious crooks, and American democracy is a dead letter.

Smarten up!

This arrangement won’t hold up for long.

For the last three-decades the kings of Wall Street have been hiring computer scientists, engineers, etc. to render labor obsolete, while the reduction in cost of production went straight into their pockets.

For that last decade those same kings of Wall Street have been hiring computer scientists, engineers, etc. to render their own trading floors and investment bankers obsolete. Automated trading, high-speed/low-latency trading, etc.

The “club” is about to get a whole lot smaller, and it’s going to be interesting to see how all those people react when they get thrown under the bus with the rest of us.

It’s not difficult at all. The buck stops at Obama, if his personnel are garbage, then it’s up to him to correct it ASAP, and take responsibility for making the wrong choice the first time around.

Ah, you reminded me of one of my fave stories:

SERGEY ALEYNIKOV GOLDMAN SACHS BLACK BOX HEIST: COMPUTER CODES AND TRADING-RELATED FILES

LINK.

I kept waiting for a follow-up, but, alas, somehow the news on this has been mighty slim. Latest I’ve been able to find is this:

Sergey may avoid jail, per a 11/17/09 article.
LINK.

Sergey stole from Goldman Sachs, and he’s only gonna get a slap on the wrist. Wonder what else Sergey knows? Did he promise not to tell? The questions go on and on. The answers not so much (and maybe that’s all there is to it, but still . . . ).

Your comment synchs with what I’ve been able to suss out.

Great (hopeful, IMVHO) news, however — looks like Bookstaber is going to be working at the SEC!
Wow!!!!

Also, note that Goldman Sachs ‘apologized’ today and announced that some miniscule portion of their revenues will be directed to ‘small biz’.
Interesting that it was only a day or two ago that Obama’s administration announced a new Fraud Task Force to go after fraud in mortgages, stocks, and securities.

The best recent news that I’ve read is that Bookstaber’s going to be at SEC.
That could be hopeful.

But I’m with DaFazio: the current team needs to be replaced (unless Geithner is playing a deeper game than we know, which is possible).

Damn, you do find some great stuff!
I’m thinking Sergey’s ass is on a platter; here’s hoping Matt Taibbi or Nomi Prins or Charles Morris or Nocera will ‘splain the significance. I read this as ‘his ass is on a platter so he’s talkin’.
Here’s hoping.

Aw, shucks (and thnx). google is my friend, and while there may be nothing more to this story, I do hope someone with solid investigative skills, and you mentioned a few, will take a look at it.

I’m honestly a little surprised that currency and interest rate swaps haven’t become a completely automated process at this point.

I agree with DeFazio, the whole lot of them should be canned. They haven’t done anything (yet). Before we throw them completely under the bus, let’s see what this Job Summit looks like.

The Dems better get crackin on creating jobs because while we’re the small minority that pays attention, the vast majority doesn’t and they won’t understand that its important to burn Obama’s feet but support him otherwise because there is a faction in America that would like to see him DEAD.

I totally agree what was said on TRMS last night, he needs our support!

As Mark Twain said, “History doesn´t repeat itself – at best it sometimes rhymes.” There was no IMF in 1927 to warn the US, as it did quite out of character in 2003, the the US faced fiscal Armageddon as early as 2006 if its central bank did not stop with the asset bubble creation and policymakers started to do a bit of regulation of its financial markets. As we now know, the IMF permanent staff were a little early in predicting when the shit would hit the fan, but quantitatively, they were spot on. Moreover, the Great Depression occurred in the midst of the American Age, money was on net flowing into the country and there was widely shared upward economic and social mobility — quite unlike the moment we live in.

I wonder if those investment bankers realize the servers are lining up to spit in their food before it’s brought out.

Wall Street had their front men and now that things have started to stabilize it’s Main Street’s turn.

Anybody starting a “Dump the Chumps” campaign to turn up the heat on Obama & Company to replace these two “banksters”? I’ll be there when you do…