Word: geithners
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...reform, 82-year-old former Federal Reserve chairman Paul Volcker, a previously marginalized Obama adviser who had chastised the Administration for making insufficient efforts to limit the size and risk profiles of big banks. The White House is tired of complaints that its economic team - especially Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner, the former New York Fed president who helped bail out AIG and other failing firms - is too close to Wall Street. Bringing the legendary gray eminence in from the cold - Obama called his plan to ban proprietary trading by commercial banks "the Volcker rule" - not only lent capitalist gravitas...
...Allergic to Populism Shortly after Obama unveiled a $117 billion plan to tax the riskier liabilities of larger financial firms, Geithner hosted a dinner for bankers. A few of them grumbled about Big Government, class warfare and the unfairness of scapegoating financial institutions that already repaid their bailout money while GM and Chrysler keep hemorrhaging taxpayer cash. But one midsize-bank CEO suggested the tax was a reasonable surcharge on too-big-to-fail conglomerates that benefit from an implicit guarantee of federal help in a crisis. "If I fail, the FDIC shuts me down," he said. Then he gestured...
...Geithner replied that he believes that the way he and the Fed devised to get AIG out of its CDS contracts will prove to be the least costly for taxpayers. He said he had no role in hiding facts about what AIG had paid its counterparties or who those counterparties were. Former Treasury Secretary Henry Paulson, who also testified at the hearing, said he was broadly supportive of the AIG bailout but had no knowledge of any payments that AIG made to particular banks. (See the worst business deals...
...tried to force counterparties to take less than they were entitled, AIG would have collapsed," Geithner told the congressional committee. "There were no better alternatives...
...very clear that the New York Fed was preoccupied with looking out for the interests of Wall Street at the expense of Main Street," says California Congressman Darrell Issa, a Republican, who questioned Geithner and others on Wednesday. "Given the circumstances and the fact that they were dealing with taxpayer dollars, the Fed had an obligation to try and secure the best deal possible for the taxpayers and instead brokered a deal that helped the rich get richer and then tried to cover...