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Politics : Just the Facts, Ma'am: A Compendium of Liberal Fiction -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Sully- who wrote (78336)	3/16/2010 12:29:59 AM
From: Sully-	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 90947

Geithner’s Lehman Brothers Fraud Problem By Mark Noonan on Financial Crisis The story: <<< … in his brief appearances in the 336-page report, Geithner’s main concern seems to be with preventing a panic over the diseased state of Lehman. Geithner not only acknowledges his efforts at concealment, but seems to believe they were the right thing to do: In addition to the losses Lehman would incur by selling “sticky” assets at firesale prices, deleveraging also raised the additional problems of market perception and valuation.3187 As Secretary Timothy Geithner explained to the Examiner, selling “sticky” assets at discounts could hurt Lehman by revealing to the market that Lehman “had a lot of air in [its] marks” and thereby further draining confidence in the valuation of the assets that remained on Lehman’s balance sheet.3188 The first sentence is drawn from a November interview between Geithner and Valukas, the second from “Reducing Systemic Risk In A Dynamic Financial System,” a speech Geithner delivered in June 2008. To say dressing up Lehman’s bleeding sores was wrong, you need to acknowledge that a central bank should not engage in the suppression of information, and I’m pretty sure we lost that argument a long time ago. Smith suspects (not without reason) that this mission to regulate the market’s feelings toward Lehman led Geithner to connive at what certainly looks to have been a fraud: the erroneous counting of “501 Repos” — assets Lehman sold with an agreement to repurchase — as straightforward sales. That is, the outside world thought these toxic assets were gone from Lehman’s books, when in fact they were merely festering. Smith has some interesting words about whether, and why, Lehman counterparties went along with this charade. (Likeliest answer: They were all betting on the come like the rest of America.) Geithner, typically, says he would have caught the problem if only we’d given him more power… >>> Enough to send Geithner to jail? No. Enough to warrant intense further investigation? Yes. Sufficient cause for Obama to fire him. Certainly. Will Geithner get fired? Are you kidding? He was appointed after it was known he was a tax cheat. In a Chicago Administration, what Geithner did is just par for the course – he was protecting the big money men from their own, stupid mistakes. If he hadn’t protected them, they wouldn’t have any money, you see? If these banksters were now poor, they couldn’t donate to the Democrat party, fund various leftist causes and, of course, provide sinecures for retired Treasury Secretaries in the by and by. Asking Obama to get rid of Geithner is to ask him to go against business as usual…it’d be to ask him to be an agent of real change we could really believe in. Ain’t gonna happen – unless Geithner becomes a direct, political liability for the mid-terms. Absent a risk to Democrat political power, there’s no chance he’ll be fired. blogsforvictory.com