The indignation over AIG will serve a useful purpose if it focuses public attention on the much larger issue — the failure of the entire approach that Treasury Secretary Tim Geithner and White House economic czar Larry Summers are using to rescue the banking system.
It would be hard to find two administrations more different than Bush and Obama. Yet, when it comes to bailing out financial firms, Geithner’s approach is a seamless continuation of his predecessor, Hank Paulson’s. It makes you wonder who is the permanent government. Perhaps Wall Street?
Even the players are the same Goldman-Citigroup crowd. The well named Neel Kashkari, the Citigroup executive brought in by Paulson to run the TARP program, is still in place. Geithner’s top assistant, Mark Patterson, is from Goldman. And most of the concepts are coming from the same Wall Street crew.
So far, the policy has been an abject failure. The latest idea is to use some of the remaining Treasury funds from the TARP program approved by Congress last October to anchor several trillion more in loans and loan guarantees by the Federal Reserve and FDIC. For weeks, Geithner has announced only vague principles of his next move
