You're doing a heck of a job, Geity.
Treasury Secretary Tim Geithner has his supporters, of course. First off, there’s the President. I’m sure, too, that his wife is very supportive of his efforts to restore fix the nation’s economy. Then, there’s, well, there’s…New York Times columnist David Brooks.
Brooks, generally a conservative voice in the paper, came out in support of what’s Geithner’s accomplished so far:
The evidence of the past eight months suggests that Geithner was mostly right and his critics were mostly wrong. The financial sector is in much better shape than it was then. TARP money is being repaid, and the debate now is what to do with the billions that were never needed. It now seems clear that nationalization would have been an unnecessary mistake — potentially expensive and dangerously disruptive.
Accept for a moment that most of that is true, the banks aren’t dangerously listing anymore, that the crisis is over and we’re on the road to recovery. What, exactly, did the Treasury Secretary contribute to that?
I’m serious. Somebody please tell me. Offhand, I can think of the “stress tests” and the PPIP, the Public-Private Investment Program. The first was no more than a thorough white-washing, and the second was just an awful idea that has yet to gain any appreciable traction.
So, somebody, anybody, please point out something specific the Treasury Secretary has done to make things better. Because I certainly couldn’t find anything in Brooks’s hyperbolic column.
