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Tough times for Timothy Geithner
U.S. Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner testifies before the Senate Budget Committee March 12, 2009 on Capitol Hill in Washington, DC.
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Kai Ryssdal: Great to have you here on this Friday, everybody. It is the 13th of March. And that makes today day number 53 of the Obama administration, a little more than six weeks. Barely enough time for cabinet secretaries to learn their way around the White House, much less figure out how to save the world.
Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner has arguably the second hardest job in this country, behind his boss, of course, and he's doing it without all the help he ought to have. Many of the department's top staff jobs have yet to be filled. Geithner himself is being criticized -- sharply, sometimes too.
You know Washington can be a tough town. And these days Wall Street is an even tougher audience. Marketplace's Steve Henn reports.
Steve Henn: For some of the American public, Treasury Secretary Tim Geithner has become the man without a plan.
SNL: I'm Timothy Geithner.
This was Saturday Night Live's opener last weekend -- a Geithner impersonator offering up a new bailout.
SNL: This $420 billion will be placed in a special fund and will go to the first individual who comes up with a workable plan to solve the banking crisis.
And for the past two days, White House Press Secretary Robert Gibbs has had to defend Geithner and the Treasury Department in his daily briefing.
Robert Gibbs: Whether it's financial stability, home foreclosure recovery and reinvestment, creating jobs, putting money into taxpayers' pockets...
Gibbs argued Geithner has accomplished a tremendous amount. Roger Altman, a former Clinton Treasury official, agrees.
Roger Altman: They have rolled out four huge initiatives in the past 50 days.
The stimulus, revising the bank bailout, a foreclosure plan, and plans to remove bad assets from bank books. But many on Wall Street want more details about that and are getting impatient. And they worry more high-level staff aren't in place to help. But Alice Rivlin at Brookings say moving too fast on any front would be an even bigger mistake.
Alice Rivlin: Those things are bound to take time.
Insiders acknowledge that finding advisers with expertise in complex financial deals who don't have conflicts of interest is hard. But the Treasury Department says it's ahead of previous administrations, filling key slots.
In Washington, I'm Steve Henn for Marketplace.
Timothy Geithner supposedly has the second hardest job in America. We must be lucky he is not the president which I believe is the harder of the two jobs and if Turbo-Tax Tim has not been able to file is taxes properly for the last several years it is no wonder he didn't understand TARP -02 which was to be transparent.The DEMs were smart to cap the salaries but let the Bank and Insurance companies give out millions of dollars of TARP-02.Timothy Geithner must still working on his Turbo Tax so he may not have time to figure all of this out. Maybe he should QUIT. Just a thought because the job he know has requires multi-tasking. And after hearing Timothy Geithner speak I now believe he(Bush) has more to offer than Timothy Geithner and I did not support Bush-Chaney. They needed help too. I believe that both the REPUBS. and The DEMS. both are losers
What do we want, a short term boost to banks and the stock market or long term health in our economy?
I am tired of Wall Street and the banks claiming impatience with the government. They created this problem now the government is beholden to them for a solution. The kind of solutions that satisfy Wall Street are the same as what got us into this mess; short term fixes and throwing money at problems.
Remember how Detroit executives first arrived in private jets but when challenged, returned much humbler and in cars? Giving people money for nothing discourages change and emboldens them to ask for more. It is time to turn the tables. Nationalize a couple of struggling banks and trade GMC Finance for loans to the struggling automaker. Then start loaning money to worthwhile businesses. Banks don't fear a recession (we have given them enough money to weather it). They fear being marginalized.
Mr. Geithner: On the micro level: The top-down approach didn't work because banks apparently just want to suck in the cash and not easy on the borrowers... More difficult to do, but probably healthier, is to give the money to people in a bottom-up approach, and let banks somehow fight their way into that cash. On the macro level: Print more money, which will in turn make other countries do the same, bringing at the end the price of debt down. The printing of more money will maybe risk the US Dollar's standing as the world currency, and seniorage revenues. In the long term however, what WILL make a difference is where money is invested; if we continue to put the money in bombs which will end in bloody holes in the ground then our value as a nation will deteriorate. If in contrast, we INVEST our money in controlling health care costs (which are a BAGGAGE on US competitiveness - compare 18%GDP to the rest of the world) and in becoming less dependent on foreign oil, then we will change the fundamentals of the US economy changing our LONG TERM outlook. Another point which can be considered an investment is in the war on drugs. Maybe we should stop exporting weapons to Mexico and importing drugs from Latin America, and could we probably save some money in youth time and lives lost to crime.
