Or How I Learned to Stop Worrying

About a month ago I questioned why Neel Kashkari - the incompetent Treasury official in charge of the TARP program - was still employed. Today, we got some good news.
Neel Kashkari is gone:
Herbert M. Allison Jr., the chief executive of Fannie Mae for the last six months, has emerged as a candidate to become the [...]

The Obama administration has lost patience with General Motors and has demanded that it restructure before it will get any more government help. That seems logical enough. Yet, when both the Obama administration and the Bush administration have given hundreds of billions of dollars to banks, that money came with no strings attached.
In demanding General [...]

Nobel Prize-winning economist Joseph Stiglitz does not like the Geithner plan:
“The Geithner plan is very badly flawed,” Stiglitz told Reuters in an interview during a Credit Suisse Asian Investment Conference in Hong Kong.
U.S. Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner’s plan to wipe up to US$1 trillion in bad debt off banks’ balance sheets, unveiled on Monday, offered “perverse [...]

After the Treasury Department released the refurbished plan to buy up “legacy assets” (formerly known by the less tasteful moniker “toxic assets”) Wall Street responded with two thumbs up. Treasury Secretary Tim Geithner has gone from goat to hero in one day:
But the stock market’s first-day verdict went in the right direction for Mr. Geithner [...]

The United States government is colluding with the banks to rob the taxpayer. That, in a nutshell, is the newly shaped Tim Geithner bank rescue plan. That, in a nutshell, was the Hank Paulson bank rescue plan that has already stolen $350 billion of taxpayer funds, plus over $175 billion in funds directly to AIG, and [...]

Barack Obama was outraged yesterday over the AIG bonuses. He was OUTRAGED. He said yesterday:
This is a corporation that finds itself in financial distress due to recklessness and greed.
Under these circumstances, it’s hard to understand how derivative traders at AIG warranted any bonuses, much less $165 million in extra pay. How do they justify this [...]

There are now serious questions being asked about Treasury Secretary Tim Geithner’s role in the AIG bonus scandal. It is clear now that Geithner knew long before this weekend about the AIG bonuses. Yet, it was not until the bonuses had been handed out - and the resulting public outrage -, that the administration jumped [...]

Let me get straight to the point. If the Obama administration gives AIG the additional $30 billion that it says it will, then it is the Obama administration that is using taxpayer money to pay hundreds of millions of dollars in bonuses to AIG’s employees. So, if the Obama administration is really that outraged over [...]

My favorite economist, Austan Goolsbee, was all over the media today talking about AIG’s bonus program on the backs of American taxpayers. As I was driving back from work this evening, I heard Goolsbee on NPR bashing AIG. He was also on MSNBC’s Hardball taking a whack at the bonus program. Suddenly Goolsbee is everywhere, [...]