Or How I Learned to Stop Worrying

Sarah Palin just resigned as Alaska governor. She announced her resignation in an odd rambling speech. Pundits in the media are speculating the resignation frees her up to run for president in 2012. Hogwash. No one resigns their first term as Governor with such a nutball speech and expects to have a national political future. She [...]

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 [...]

Today The Daily Star published my op-ed “Who is ‘Sunita Paul’?” The op-ed expands on my post on Sunita Paul from last week.
The full op-ed follows:
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Saturday, April 11, 2009
Who is ’Sunita Paul’? 
Mashuqur Rahman
“SUNITA PAUL” is an “Indian journalist” who has been writing inflammatory articles on Bangladesh in little known foreign online outlets. “Sunita Paul” is also [...]

Sunita Paul is a plagiarist.
Sunita Paul is a “journalist” who has recently been publishing a series of sensational articles about Bangladesh. She has caused quite a stir because her articles make extraordinary claims, based on anonymous sources, about the political situation in Bangladesh. Extraordinary claims without much factual support however require a significant leap of faith by the reader. [...]

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 [...]

December 15, 1989:
All four engines of a KLM Boeing 747 temporarily shut down yesterday when the jumbo jet flew through a cloud of ash from the erupting Redoubt Volcano in Alaska, Government officials reported.
The huge airliner descended from 25,000 feet to 12,000 feet in eight minutes before the crew was able to restart two of [...]

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 [...]