The bailout of Citigroup, which put the government at risk of hundreds of billions of dollars of losses, was set in motion by three men whose professional lives have long been intertwined.
Treasury Secretary Henry M. Paulson Jr.; Citigroup board member Robert E. Rubin; and Timothy F. Geithner, the president of the Federal Reserve Bank of New York, have for years followed one another in and out of jobs in government and industry. Their close relationships helped pave the way for one of the largest and most dramatic government interventions to date in the financial crisis.
The bailout, announced late Sunday night, was designed to make a statement, officials said. In agreeing to protect Citigroup against potential losses on a $306 billion pool of troubled assets, the government made clear that it was not going to allow one of the nation's largest financial firms to collapse.
Yesterday, the markets cheered the rescue, sending Citigroup's shares soaring 58 percent while the Dow Jones industrial average climbed 4.9 percent, or 396.97 points...
I like this comment over at Hullabaloo, where Digby is moving slowly away from her Oborg defense:
Obama didn't have to appoint Phil Gramm.
He appointed Larry Summers, who backed every piece of de-regulation Gramm wanted passed, especially derivatives, which gave us Enron AND subprime mortgages.
You didn't know?
-Mary
Well, I could have guessed. With an electorate so big the Republicans couldn't get away with the theft of the election, the Company had to drop back to its populist position.
Still, many people are beginning to see through it. What a bewildered Christopher Hayes sez:
...Not a single, solitary, actual dyed-in-the-wool progressive has, as far as I can tell, even been mentioned for a position in the new administration. Not one. Remember this is the movement that was right about Iraq, right about wage stagnation and inequality, right about financial deregulation, right about global warming and right about health care. And I don't just mean in that in a sectarian way. I mean to say that the emerging establishment consensus on all of these issues came from the left. There's tons of things the left is right about that aren't even close to mainstream (taking a hatchet to the national security state and ending the prison industrial complex to name just two), but hopefully we're moving there.
And yet, no one who comes from the part of American political and intellectual life that has given birth to all of these ideas is anywhere to be found within miles of the Obama cabinet thus far. WTF?
WTF?
2 comments:
No surprise to me. On another progressive board I used to be on, I was the almost the lone dissenter about Obama. I have long known that he was not a progressive, although he was happy to use progressives to help him get elected.
I am still an Obama-believer and want to see what he does when in office. I will not give up on him until I see that nothing has changed for the better. Maybe he knows something that we don't.
There is no doubt that the Obama administration will do less damage to the world than a McCain one would've. To say nothing of the radioactive cinders we would likely have if Sarah Palin took office. But that's not saying much.
Obama's going to have a whole peanut gallery on the Right telling him how to be a Patriot. It would be useful to have a contingent with the same vocal tendencies giving input on the Left.
Post a Comment