The cooling-off period is over for former Treasury Secretary Tim Geithner, who is joining the private equity firm Warburg Pincus as president and managing director. Geithner had initially joined the Council on Foreign Relations as a senior fellow after leaving the Treasury Department early this year. He had taken several plum speaking engagements at Wall …
Tag: Tim Geithner
Searching for Bobby Rubin
With the Geithner “wunderkind” and Summers “socratic genius” brands badly damaged, Obama faces pressure from a broad and growing spectrum to find new front men for his economic policy team. This was in evidence last week when Paul Volcker and Austan Goolsbee were trucked in from oblivion to champion Obama’s new bank reform agenda. Volcker …
Geithner’s Big Lie
The front page of the New York Times says it all this morning: “The treasury secretary told a House panel that failure to provide A.I.G. with the $85 billion bailout would have been “catastrophic” for the economy.” Both Paulson and Geithner also defended their actions with the old warning about the imminence of a “second …
The Dow of Geithner
In early March, as the AIG bonus controversy fueled public outrage at Wall Street’s chief enablers in Washington, it looked like Treasury Secretary Geithner would be forced out of his post before he got a chance to smell the cherry blossoms. Their backs to the wall, Geithner and friends subsequently waged a confidence game, slinging …
Goldman Sachs’ White House ties run deep
While Goldman Sachs‘ managing partners prepare their lists for Fifth Avenue shopping sprees on bonus day, the firm’s public relations department is grappling with an image problem that has some staying power. Goldman’s record profiteering at a time of chronic unemployment and systemic crisis along with Matt Taibbi’s superb article on Goldman’s role in market …
A closer look at a toxic avenger
To paraphrase Paul Krugman, it looks like the zombies have won. Insolvent banks continue to roam the earth, sucking up unfathomable sums of taxpayer capital, provided to hedge fund intermediaries as nonrecourse loans. The scheme is designed to create inflated “auction” prices by incentivizing investors to over-bid on assets which carry almost no downside risk …