Timo-FEY Says "Cough Up The Bucks!"

Having viewed fast-talking Timofey on George Stoopidopoulos' Sunday Morning Fest of Fools (except for Paul Krugman who, strange to report, was allotted very little time afterwards to share his critical analysis with the audience), trying to talk his way out of admitting that the major focus of his plan was to keep the criminals who caused the crisis steadfastly in business (or pay their bonuses as they say "adieu!"), it occurred to me that most people could be hoodwinked by the sexy, blonde, quicker-thinker-than-Georgie-could-ever-be exterior of the now very much man-about-town Treasury Secretary, and actually believe that something good was being done in their names. Neil Young, having followed the Geithner plan closely, has released a citizen's lament. It's only rock and roll . . . but it's so true! Neil Young - Cough Up The Bucks
William Engdahl says that "Geithner’s ‘Dirty Little Secret’" is that "The Entire Global Financial System is at Risk" and that "the Solution to the Financial Crisis becomes the Cause." (Emphasis marks were inserted for your viewing pleasure - Ed.)

US Treasury Secretary Tim Geithner has unveiled his long-awaited plan to put the US banking system back in order. In doing so, he has refused to tell the ‘dirty little secret’ of the present financial crisis. By refusing to do so, he is trying to save de facto bankrupt US banks that threaten to bring the entire global system down in a new more devastating phase of wealth destruction. The Geithner Plan, his so-called Public-Private Partnership Investment Program or PPPIP, as we have noted previously is designed not to restore a healthy lending system which would funnel credit to business and consumers. Rather it is yet another intricate scheme to pour even more hundreds of billions directly to the leading banks and Wall Street firms responsible for the current mess in world credit markets without demanding they change their business model. Yet, one might say, won’t this eventually help the problem by getting the banks back to health? Not the way the Obama Administration is proceeding. In defending his plan on US TV recently, Geithner, a protégé of Henry Kissinger who previously was CEO of the New York Federal Reserve Bank, argued that his intent was ‘not to sustain weak banks at the expense of strong.’ Yet this is precisely what the PPPIP does. The weak banks are the five largest banks in the system. The ‘dirty little secret’ which Geithner is going to great degrees to obscure from the public is very simple. There are only at most perhaps five US banks which are the source of the toxic poison that is causing such dislocation in the world financial system. What Geithner is desperately trying to protect is that reality. The heart of the present problem and the reason ordinary loan losses as in prior bank crises are not the problem, is a variety of exotic financial derivatives, most especially so-called Credit Default Swaps. In 2000 the Clinton Administration then-Treasury Secretary was a man named Larry Summers. Summers had just been promoted from No. 2 under Wall Street Goldman Sachs banker Robert Rubin to be No. 1 when Rubin left Washington to take up the post of Vice Chairman of Citigroup. As I describe in detail in my new book, Power of Money: The Rise and Fall of the American Century, to be released this summer, Summers convinced President Bill Clinton to sign several Republican bills into law which opened the floodgates for banks to abuse their powers. The fact that the Wall Street big banks spent some $5 billion in lobbying for these changes after 1998 was likely not lost on Clinton. One significant law was the repeal of the 1933 Depression-era Glass-Steagall Act that prohibited mergers of commercial banks, insurance companies and brokerage firms like Merrill Lynch or Goldman Sachs. A second law backed by Treasury Secretary Summers in 2000 was an obscure but deadly important Commodity Futures Modernization Act of 2000. That law prevented the responsible US Government regulatory agency, Commodity Futures Trading Corporation (CFTC), from having any oversight over the trading of financial derivatives. The new CFMA law stipulated that so-called Over-the-Counter (OTC) derivatives like Credit Default Swaps, such as those involved in the AIG insurance disaster, (which investor Warren Buffett once called ‘weapons of mass financial destruction’), be free from Government regulation. At the time Summers was busy opening the floodgates of financial abuse for the Wall Street Money Trust, his assistant was none other than Tim Geithner, the man who today is US Treasury Secretary. Today, Geithner’s old boss, Larry Summers, is President Obama’s chief economic adviser, as head of the White House Economic Council. To have Geithner and Summers responsible for cleaning up the financial mess is tantamount to putting the proverbial fox in to guard the henhouse.

Read the rest of this article here. And poor Paul Craig Roberts must be feeling pretty badly right about now as his once-proud accomplishment of getting government out of the way of big business (under Reagan!) has come back to bite him hard. (Emphasis marks inserted - Ed.)

On March 19 the New York Times reported: “The Fed said it would purchase an additional $750 billion worth of government-guaranteed mortgage-backed securities, on top of the $500 billion that it is currently in the process of buying. In addition, the Fed said it would buy up to $300 billion worth of longer-term Treasury securities over the next six months.” The Federal Reserve says that its purchase of $1 trillion in existing bonds is part of its plan to revive the economy. Another way to view the Fed’s announcement is to see it as a preemptive rescue. Is the Fed rescuing banks from their bond portfolios prior to the destruction of bond prices by inflation? The answer to this question probably lies in the answer to the unanswered question of how the unprecedented sizes of the FY 2009 and FY 2010 federal budget deficits will be financed. Neither the US savings rate nor the trade surpluses of our major foreign lenders are sufficient. I know of only two ways of financing the looming monster deficits. One, courtesy of Pam Martens, is that the federal deficits could be financed by further flight from equities and other investments.

Read the rest of this article here. Suzan ___________________________