Wednesday, March 18, 2009

Jettison Geithner and Summers post-haste

Stephen Suh over at Cogitamus says what needs to be said,

Geithner is wholly captive to Wall Street groupthink; as Harold Meyerson said in the WaPo, we have "a Treasury secretary who cannot conceive of an alternative to our catastrophic system of banking." He cannot and will not attempt to consider doing business any other way.

President Obama needs to deal with Geithner - and Larry Summers, who seems to think his job is peddling BS for Geithner and their buddies on Wall Street - and he needs to do it quickly. His Treasury Secretary is making the Obama administration look like the Bush administration: constant, erratic strategy changes, continual need to walk back plans and statements, the palpable sense that no one knows what is going on or what's going to happen next.

Obama was elected in part because of his ability to project a steady, quiet competence in the face of the GOP's hysterics during the campaign. And on a host of issues, from stem cells to equal pay, from protecting choice to enacting a massive stimulus program, even to Obama's commitment to reforming healthcare, that competence is on display. President Obama's second term - and not only that but his ability to enact his agenda during his first term - rides in equal parts on his policies actually working and Americans' continued belief that he knows what he's doing. Timothy Geithner makes Obama look dumb, and he can't afford it.

Neither can we, and that's why [they] needs [sic] to go away.

1 comment:

Anonymous said...

You might say he needs to go away, but the fact is that Geithner, Bernanke, etc. are actually beginning to do something right. When the market starts to show upticks in the sight of bad news, for a market that is below where it should be (as it is now) this is a sign that the correction is coming around. We've got a long way to go, but economically, in general the Obama administration, including Geithner, is on sound footing. I can't believe I just typed that.