Word: geithners
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...fingerprints. For example, Michael Greenberger, a policy adviser to Americans for Financial Reform, a coalition of union, consumer and environmental groups, says Treasury lobbied "vigorously" for loopholes exempting certain over-the-counter derivatives from new regulations, a key objective of centrist New Democrats who took their concerns to Geithner - and one shared by the Chamber of Commerce, the National Association of Manufacturers and big banks...
...telling story. For one thing, it's a reminder that Geithner is the kind of guy who hosts dinners for bankers. He's not a populist; he's allergic to populists, and so are his aides. Behind closed doors, Treasury officials can sound like their MoveOn.org caricatures, griping about "wacko populists" who use "anticapitalist rhetoric" to "extract their pound of flesh from the Street" - even making excuses for the megabankers who no-showed a recent White House meeting with Obama. ("I wouldn't say they blew him off," said one Treasury aide.) Geithner has opposed proposals to tax Wall Street...
...Obama's bank tax - designed not only to make taxpayers whole but also to discourage excessive risk-taking - came from Geithner. And so did most of the Administration's plans to address the too-big-to-fail problem, create an independent consumer agency for financial products and otherwise overhaul the regulatory system that failed so dramatically in 2008. Geithner sees big banks not as evil empires to be toppled but as moneymaking machines to be restrained, so that the panic and bailouts of two years ago are never repeated. Just because it's populist, he likes to say, doesn...
...conspicuously not the case with health care reform, the Administration has laid out specific changes it wants to see in financial oversight. In June, Geithner released an 88-page paper with proposals to address just about everything that went wrong before the meltdown, from unregulated brokers who peddled toxic subprime mortgages with brutal fine print to in-the-tank ratings agencies that vouched for house-of-cards financial instruments they didn't even understand. He proposed much tougher oversight of derivatives, hedge funds and nonbank financial firms like AIG, as well as so-called resolution authority to help public officials...
...bill the House passed in December closely tracks the Treasury proposals; Geithner's aides say they got at least 80% of what they wanted, including the stand-alone consumer agency, an easy-to-understand innovation for Americans who think mortgages and credit cards should be as safe as toasters. Many of the differences were technical or turf-based: how to structure the resolution authority and regulate systemic risks, a loophole exempting "industrial loan companies" from various regulations, more loopholes shielding community banks and auto dealers (known for their pull with local Congressmen) from the new consumer agency's direct oversight...