The man marketed by the Obama administration
as 'the only person' smart enough to save the financial system apparently made a series of strategic blunders costing
taxpayers billions.
Change! Eh, sorry -- that was my Obama Tourette's Syndrome kicking in.
Another one of the nation's largest lenders has filed for bankruptcy. On the brink for months, CIT filed for Chapter 11 protection on Sunday... But here's the bad news: While senior debt holders will only lose 30% of their investment, we, the U.S. taxpayer, will lose the entire $2.3 billion we lent the company this summer.
William Black, professor at the University of Missouri-Kansas City School of Law is dumbfounded. "We put ourselves on the hook in a completely inept way where we lose first. We lose entirely as the taxpayers."
Black, a former top federal banking regulator, blames Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner for negotiating such a bad deal on behalf of the American public...
The government was in no way obligated to lend the struggling CIT money and, in fact, initially refused to provide it bailout funds. More importantly, being the lender of last resort, the government should have guaranteed we'd be the first to get paid if CIT eventually filed Chapter 11. By failing to do so, "it's like he [Geithner] burned billions of dollars again in government money, our money, gratuitously," says Black.
Silly, yes, but not truly surprising coming from the man who couldn't operate TurboTax successfully.
And
Dylan Ratigan adds another craptastic Geithner tale:
...last week, the Treasury Secretary endorsed a piece of legislation that instead of stopping a select few companies 
from profiting from the implicit taxpayer-guarantee of Too Big Too Fail seeks to officially condone it. If the most prized skill in our society economically is a competition to see who can lend and insure the most money without consequences, you have doomed our nation's people to lose everything in the world's largest ever betting parlor; and that is precisely the system this Treasury Secretary -- Tim Geithner -- is seeking to legalize in America today.
However, the smoking gun for Secretary Geithner comes from a recent Bloomberg FOIA disclosure regarding events from last November. It was then that New York Federal Reserve Governor Tim Geithner decided to deliver 100 cents on the dollar, in secret no less, to pay off the counter parties to the world's largest (and still un-investigated) insurance fraud -- AIG...
...This full payoff with taxpayer dollars was carried out by Geithner after AIG's bank customers, such as Goldman Sachs, Deutsche Bank and Societe Generale, had already previously agreed to taking as little as 40 cents on the dollar. Even after the GM autoworkers, bondholders and vendors all received a government-enforced haircut on their contracts, he still had the audacity to claim the "sanctity of contracts" in the dealings with these companies like AIG...
Judging by the number of
bankers, lobbyists, corporate bigwigs and billionaires named Soros who have visited the White House, Ratigan really shouldn't be surprised by the handouts. The taxpayers, on the other hand, should make their voices heard tomorrow, in 2010 and in 2012.
We had car shows, boat shows, beauty shows and dog shows.
We ran robots on the surface of Mars by remote control.
Our women came from all over the world in all shapes and sizes hues and scents.
We actually believed that all men are created equal and tried to make it come true.
Everybody liked our movies and loved our television shows.
We tried to educate everybody, whether they wanted it or not. Sometimes we succeeded.
We did Levis.
We held the torch high and hundreds of millions came. No matter what the cost.
We saved Europe twice and liberated it once.
We believed so deeply and so abidingly in free speech that we protected and even honored and in some cases even elected traitors.
We let you be as freaky as you wanted to be.
We paid you not to plant crops and not to work.
We died in the hundreds of thousands to end slavery here and around the world.
We invented Jazz.
We wrote the Declaration of Independence, the Constitution, and the Gettysberg address.
We went to the moon to see how far we could hit a golf ball...
