Robert Scheer
OpEdNews
6/1/2011
What was Timothy Geithner thinking back in 2008 when, as president of the New York Fed, he decided to give Goldman Sachs a $30 billion interest-free loan as part of an $80 billion secret float to favored banks? The sordid details of that program were finally made public this week in response to a court order for a Freedom of Information Act release, thanks to a Bloomberg News lawsuit. Sorry, my bad: It wasn’t an interest-free loan; make that .01 percent that Goldman paid to borrow taxpayer money when ordinary folks who missed a few credit card payments in order to finance their mortgages were being slapped with interest rates of more than 25 percent.
One wonders if Barack Obama was fully aware of Geithner’s deceitful performance at the New York Fed when he appointed him treasury secretary in the incoming administration. The president was probably ignorant of this particular giveaway, as were key members of Congress. “I wasn’t aware of this program until now,” Barney Frank, D-Mass., who at the time chaired the House Financial Services Committee, admitted in referring to Geithner’s “single-tranche open-market operations” program. And there was no language in the Dodd-Frank law supposedly reining in the banks that compelled the Fed to reveal the existence of this program.
It was merely one small part of that reckless policy of throwing mad money at the banks while ignoring the plight of homeowners whom the banks had swindled, a plan pursued by both the Bush and the Obama administrations that set the stage for the current slide into a double-dip recession…
The article continues at OpEdNews.
Related: Sarah Palin dismisses Treasury Secretary Tim Geithner’s warnings about debt ceiling [which seems entirely reasonable to us at this point, given just how untrustworthy Geithner has proven himself to be. ~CAJ]
Also, Freshmen Republicans leave meeting with Timothy Geithner frustrated
House Republican freshmen emerged from a closed meeting with Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner with much of the same frustration they had after the White House meeting yesterday, saying they do not expect a plan from the White House on massive spending cuts to accompany the debt hike.
The hang-up from Republican newbies mirrored the concern from leadership — that President Barack Obama has not put forth a plan to raise the debt ceiling…
