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Politics : Illyia's Heart on SI -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: siempre33 who wrote (5993)	4/28/2009 10:21:17 AM
From: siempre33	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 7567

Geithner, Member and Overseer of Finance Club April 26, 2009 nytimes.com (Page 5 of 7) According to New York Fed officials, Mr. Geithner informed the reserve bank’s lawyers about the exchange with Mr. Weill, and they told him to recuse himself from Citigroup business until the matter was resolved. Mr. Geithner said he “would never put myself in a position where my actions were influenced by a personal relationship.” Other chief financial regulators at the Federal Deposit Insurance Company and the Securities and Exchange Commission say they keep officials from institutions they supervise at arm’s length, to avoid even the appearance of a conflict. While the New York Fed’s rules do not prevent its president from holding such one-on-one meetings, that was not the general practice of Mr. Geithner’s recent predecessors, said Ernest T. Patrikis, a former general counsel and chief operating officer at the New York Fed. “Typically, there would be senior staff there to protect against disputes in the future as to the nature of the conversations,” he said. Coping With Crisis As Mr. Geithner sees it, most of the institutions hit hardest by the crisis were not under his jurisdiction — some foreign banks, mortgage companies and brokerage firms. But he acknowledges that “the thing I feel somewhat burdened by is that I didn’t attempt to try to change the rules of the game on capital requirements early on,” which could have left banks in better shape to weather the storm. By last fall, it was too late. The government, with Mr. Geithner playing a lead role alongside Mr. Bernanke and Mr. Paulson, scurried to rescue the financial system from collapse. As the Fed became the biggest vehicle for the bailout, its balance sheet more than doubled, from $900 billion in October 2007 to more than $2 trillion today. “I couldn’t have cared less about Wall Street, but we faced a crisis that was going to cause enormous damage to the economy,” Mr. Geithner said. The first to fall was Bear Stearns, which had bet heavily on mortgages and by mid-March was tottering. Mr. Geithner and Mr. Paulson persuaded JPMorgan Chase to take over Bear. But to complete the deal, JPMorgan insisted that the government buy $29 billion in risky securities owned by Bear. Some officials at the Federal Reserve feared encouraging risky behavior by bailing out an investment house that did not even fall under its umbrella. To Mr. Geithner’s supporters, that he prevailed in the case of Bear and other bailout decisions is testament to his leadership. “He was a leader in trying to come up with an aggressive set of policies so that it wouldn’t get completely out of control,” said Philipp Hildebrand, a top official at the Swiss National Bank who has worked with Mr. Geithner to coordinate an international response to the worldwide financial crisis. But others are less enthusiastic. William Poole, president of the Federal Reserve Bank of St. Louis until March 2008, said that the Fed, by effectively creating money out of thin air, not only runs the risk of “massive inflation” but has also done an end-run around Congressional power to control spending. Many of the programs “ought to be legislated and shouldn’t be in the Federal Reserve at all,” he contended. In making the Bear deal, the New York Fed agreed to accept Bear’s own calculation of the value of assets acquired with taxpayer money, even though those values were almost certain to decline as the economy deteriorated. Although Fed officials argue that they can hold onto those assets until they increase in value, to date taxpayers have lost $3.4 billion. Even these losses are probably understated, given how the Federal Reserve priced the holdings, said Janet Tavakoli, president of Tavakoli Structured Finance, a consulting firm in Chicago. “You can assume that it has used magical thinking in valuing these assets,” she said. Mr. Geithner played a pivotal role in the next bailout, which was even bigger — that of the American International Group, the insurance giant whose derivatives business had brought it to the brink of collapse in September. He also went to bat for Goldman Sachs, one of the insurer’s biggest trading partners.