Why, oh why, is Timothy Geithner still Treasury Secretary?
His father has many connections to China. He evaded taxes. He has been making secret deals with banks.
If we want change, why the hell is he still in charge of the Treasury?
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Perhaps because you cannot point to anything he has done wrong since becoming Treasury Secretary.
I’d guess he’s in the job because he knows how the banking system works. There are a limited number of people available for the job that have the requisite qualifications. Getting rid of them one by one may make great political sense for some, but it isn’t likely to result in a healthy economy for the USA.
I agree with you. The problem is, these are the same people who ran the banking system which caused it to collapse. So are they really the people that are qualified to fix it? If a CEO runs a company into the ground, he usually gets fired and a new mind comes in to try and fix it.
It seems that most of the people that hold the positions you speak of, have been the same people for a long time. If these people are all connected and have the same interests, yet they are the “experts,” who is gonna tell them that what they are doing, may be wrong?
@chris6137 That is true, but there is no way around it. The people who were running the banking system when it failed are the only set of people who know HOW to run the system. I would hope that the President is wise enough to pick from those who do understand the system people who learned something from its collapse and won’t make the same mistake a second time. Geithner must certainly know he’s under intense scrutiny now.
We really should take,“In god we trust,” off of money and change it to, “Trust the Fed” or “Cross your fingers.”
Sure they may know how to “run the system,” but who are they running the system for?
There is a huge well of anger against the Fed right now, much of it well deserved. But the focus should reach far beyond the Fed. They were being pushed politically for 3 decades now to keep their hands off the system as much as possible by the free-market prophets of the right. The Gramm, Leach, Bliley act of 1999 gutted the protections put in place after the Great Depression by the Glass-Steagall Act of 1933. That Republican move, signed into law by Bill Clinton, made what happened inevitable.
If we chose to get rid of the Fed, we would need a Government Run central bank instead. It would seem to me that the prophets of free-market solutions ought to prefer the Fed, which is not fully a Government Agency, to that.
He’s actually done a pretty good job all things considered. BUT, if the allegations against him hold true (the AIG stuff), then you probably can expect to see him resigning sometime in the near future.
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