Category: regulation

12 February 2013, 7:07 PM

George F%$# ing Will??!?!?!!?

George Will is not just a partisan hack. He’s the guy who prepped Ronald Reagan for the 1980s debate while knowingly using Jimmy Carter’s stolen briefing books.

So, it is with some surprise that I note that he is calling for a breakup of the big banks:

With his chronically gravelly voice and relentlessly liberal agenda, Sherrod Brown seems to have stepped out of “Les Miserables,” hoarse from singing revolutionary anthems at the barricades. Today, Ohio’s senior senator has a project worthy of Victor Hugo — and of conservatives’ support. He wants to break up the biggest banks.

He would advocate this even if he thought such banks would never have a crisis sufficient to threaten the financial system. He believes they are unhealthy for the financial system even when they are healthy. This is because there is a silent subsidy — an unfair competitive advantage relative to community banks — inherent in being deemed by the government, implicitly but clearly, too big to fail.

The Senate has unanimously passed a bill offered by Brown and Sen. David Vitter, a Louisiana Republican, directing the Government Accountability Office to study whether banks with more than $500 billion in assets acquire an “economic benefit” because of their dangerous scale. Is their debt priced favorably because, being TBTF, they are considered especially creditworthy? Brown believes the 20 largest banks pay less when borrowing — 50 to 80 basis points less — than community banks must pay.

In a sense, TBTF began under Ronald Reagan with the 1984 rescue of Continental Illinois, then the seventh-largest bank. In 2011, the four biggest U.S. banks (JPMorgan Chase, Bank of America, Citigroup and Wells Fargo) had 40 percent of all federally insured deposits. Today, the 5,500 community banks have 12 percent of the banking industry’s assets. The 12 banks with $250 billion to $2.3 trillion in assets total 69 percent. The 20 largest banks’ assets total 84.5 percent of the nation’s gross domestic product.

………

By breaking up the biggest banks, conservatives will not be putting asunder what the free market has joined together. Government nurtured these behemoths by weaving an improvident safety net and by practicing crony capitalism. Dismantling them would be a blow against government that has become too big not to fail. Aux barricades!

(Emphasis original)

This is not what I expect from Will, and there is a part of me that is wondering whether this is more of a political tactic than a recognition of reality.

If the Republicans want an effective line of attack, they could do a lot worse than saying that Obama is determined to protect and defend the too big to fail banks.

It is something that would undermine any populist cred that Obama might seek to achieve, and as a bonus, it’s true.

So, either Will is late to this game, or he’s the the first volley in a Republican attack.

If I were a betting man, I’d call it even money.

11 February 2013, 9:36 PM

Meet the New Boss, Same as the Old Boss………

It appears that we will get fooled again

Jack Lew, who has been nominated by Barack Obama as Timothy Geithner’s replacement as Secretary of the Treasury.

Well, if you think back to Geithner’s confirmation hearings, it turned out that he simply did not pay his Social Security taxes for a few years while working at the IMF.

Well Jack Lew does one better, he squirreled away funds in the Cayman Islands:

Jack Lew, President Barack Obama’s Treasury Secretary nominee, previously held up to $100,000 in investments in an offshore hedge fund located in the Cayman Islands, according to financial disclosure forms.

Lew’s financial disclosure forms, filed in 2009 and 2011, showed that Lew had invested between $50,000 and $100,000 in a fund called Citigroup Venture Capital International Growth Partnership (Employee) II, L.P. — the very type of fund President Obama has repeatedly criticized.

The fund is an international venture capital fund for employees of Citigroup. According to his official White House biography, Lew served as managing director and chief operating officer of Citi Global Wealth Management and then Citi Alternative Investments (CAI) from 2006 to 2008.

Yeah, he is so not going to be the guy who cleans up Wall Street

H/t AmericaBlog.

10 February 2013, 7:01 PM

5 Principals for Modern Communications Technology

Harold Feld, Senior Vice President of Public Knowledge, telco policy wonk extraordinaire, and friend with whom I do medieval recreation with, has a must read essay on what a modern IP based telephone system should be like.

Basically, and unsurprisingly, it comes down to the same 5 principals that current switch based phone system has:

Universal service for all Americans. (Lifeline service for the poor)
Guaranteed interconnection, so that a Verizon user can make a call to a Comcast user.
Meaningful consumer protections. (i.e. “truth in billing”, which is lacking in cell phone service right now)
Reliability (4 “9”s of reliability, something that is lacking in cell phone service right now, as well as various IP telephony services like AT&T’s UVerse)
Emergency calls that work. (911 standards)

As is clear to anyone who spent even a few years under Ma Bell, these are not new concepts. Our phone system has run under this for the past 80 years, since the New Deal.

Unfortunately, with the urging of what I call the “free market mousketeers”, these principals have been slowly been rolled back, and this is not a good thing, as the people and first responders who were left without communications following super-storm Sandy can attest to.

As Mr. Feld notes, the real solutions to many of these problems is to separate the service (voice telephone) from the underlying technology (PSTN vs. IP, or whatever might succeed IP) from a regulatory perspective.

Watch the video. It is both clear, and does a good job of making what is ordinarily a very dry subject accessible.

7 February 2013, 7:52 PM

This is Called a Back Loaded Bribe

The soon to be ex-Secretary of the Treasury Timothy Geithner plans to write a book:

Timothy Geithner, who played a lead role battling the global financial crisis both at the U.S. Treasury and New York Federal Reserve, is planning to write a book on the U.S. response, a spokeswoman said on Wednesday.

Geithner, who was the longest-serving member of President Barack Obama’s economic team when he stepped down as secretary of the Treasury last month, is credited with helping to calm the financial storm that swept through Wall Street in 2007-2009.

But his support for bailing out big banks was controversial and many critics have accused him of doing too little for Main Street. In 2009, some lawmakers called for his resignation.

His spokeswoman said he had not started writing the book and will meet with publishers soon.

Any guess as to the size of his advance?

I’m guessing that it will be 7 figures.

Say what you will about the banksters, but they do tend to throw a few crumbs to their evil minions.

30 January 2013, 7:39 PM

Some Good News

It looks like Europe will be implementing a financial transaction song with teeth:

The details of Europe’s new financial transactions tax won’t be made public for a few weeks, but the FT’s Alex Barker has seen a draft, and it looks impressively robust. The tax is being implemented by 11 countries, including most importantly Germany and France, and it’s going to be levied at two levels: 0.1% on securities trades, and 0.01% on derivatives trades. It’s also going to be very difficult to dodge: any trader whose institutional headquarters is in one of the 11 countries will have to pay the tax, as will all transactions taking place in those countries, and all transactions involving securities issued in those countries.

The tax will have two main purposes. The first is to raise substantial tax revenues on the order of $45 billion per year; the second is to discourage financial speculation. I’m hopeful on the former, but less so on the latter.

As Robert Peston and Avinash Persaud pointed out back in 2011, financial transactions taxes work pretty well: even the UK, which is implacably opposed to the European tax and which won’t ever join such a scheme, levies a surprisingly large 0.5% tax whenever anybody — anywhere in the world — trades a UK stock. And yet, somehow, London remains the first choice for international companies looking for a place to list their shares.

I aggee with Felix Salmon’s closing:

So let’s hope that this tax gets introduced; that it works; and that the rest of the world, seeing the costs and the benefits, starts to follow suit and sign on too. The area covered by the initial 11 countries is big enough that the tax will work well at inception, but as more and more countries join the scheme, the tax will become increasingly efficient and effective. Maybe, eventually, it could even incorporate the U.S.

Personally, I would like to see the tax on securities should be a bit hither (about 0.3%) derivatives should be much higher (at least .1%, and better yet something north of ½%), but I really want to see this camel’s nose to get under the tent.

29 January 2013, 9:50 PM

Least Surprising News of the Day

Timothy Geithner’s Treasury Department ignored guidelines and allowed bailed out banksters to write their own paychecks:

The Treasury Department ignored its own guidelines on executive pay at firms that received taxpayer bailouts and last year approved compensation packages of more than $3 million for the senior ranks at General Motors, Ally Financial and American International Group, according to a watchdog report released Monday.

The report from the special inspector general for the Troubled Assets Relief Program said the government’s pay czar signed off on $6.2 million in raises for 18 employees at the three companies. The chief executive of a division of AIG received a $1 million raise, while an executive at GM’s troubled European unit was given a $100,000 raise. In one instance, an employee of Ally’s Residential Capital was awarded a $200,000 pay increase weeks before the subsidiary filed for bankruptcy.

………

Monday’s report evaluates Treasury’s actions since then, with stinging allegations of lax oversight and supervision. Romero said Geoghegan deferred to the pay proposals provided by the companies, approving raises above pay limits and failing to link compensation to performance.

“Treasury made no meaningful reform to its processes,” the special inspector said in the latest report. “Lacking criteria and an effective decision-making process, Treasury risks continuing to award executives of bailed-out companies excessive cash compensation without good cause.”

This is so not shocking.

29 January 2013, 9:06 PM

Hurrray for the ……………… Swiss?

Switzerland citizens have petitioned binding shareholder votes on executive compensation to referendum:

In February 2008, Thomas Minder, a Swiss businessman whose family-owned company is best known for its old-fashioned herbal toothpaste, attacked his banker, UBS Chairman Marcel Ospel, as if he were a form of stubborn plaque. At a shareholders’ meeting in Basel, he stormed the podium as Ospel addressed the crowd. Ospel’s bodyguards grappled with Minder and wrestled him away before he could land his symbolic blow — he was trying to hand the embattled head of Switzerland’s largest bank a bound copy of Swiss company law, which codifies corporate temperance.

“Gentlemen, you are responsible for the biggest write-downs in Swiss corporate history,” Minder had railed just a few minutes before, referring to UBS’s loss of $50 billion during the subprime meltdown that prompted it to seek a government bailout. “Put an end to the Americanization of UBS corporate philosophy!”

The bodyguards marched Minder out of the hall amid a chorus of boos and jeers. Two months later, Ospel was gone, taking the fall for UBS’s recklessness, but Minder’s campaign against big bonuses had only just begun; shortly after Ospel was ousted, Minder filed the 100,000 signatures needed to launch a referendum to impose some of the tightest controls on executive compensation in the world.

Of the top 100 Swiss companies, 49 give shareholders a consulting vote on the pay of executives. A few other countries, including the United States and Germany, have introduced advisory “say on pay” votes in response to the anger over inequality and corporate excess that drove the Occupy Wall Street movement. Britain is also planning to implement rules in late 2013 that will give shareholders a binding vote on pay and “exit payments” at least every three years. Minder’s initiative goes further, forcing all listed companies to have binding votes on compensation for company managers and directors, and ban golden handshakes and parachutes. It would also ban bonus payments to managers if their companies are taken over, and impose severe penalties — including possible jail sentences and fines — for breaches of these new rules.

Honestly, I was hoping that someone would do this, but in my wildest dream, I would have not have thought that it was the Swiss who would be at the forefront of this movement.

It appears that I have some stereotypical views about the Swiss, basically as conventional banker types, which does not reflect the actual reality. I’ve got to be more enlightened.

28 January 2013, 8:55 PM

Iceland Wins in Court Over Icesave Deposite Guarantees

I’m not particularly surprised:

A European court has cleared the Icelandic government of failing to guarantee minimum levels of compensation for UK and Dutch savers in the collapsed Icesave bank.

Icesave, run by the Icelandic Landsbanki, collapsed in 2008 along with all of Iceland’s banking system.

The UK and Dutch savers were bailed out completely by their governments.

The ruling may halt the UK’s attempt to get all of its money back from the Icelandic government.

………

The Icelandic government said it took “considerable satisfaction” from the ruling from the European Free Trade Agreement (EFTA) Court.

“Iceland has from the start maintained that there is legal uncertainty as to whether a state is responsible for ensuring payments of minimum guarantees to depositors using its own funds and has stressed the importance of having this issue clarified in court,” it said.

………

The EFTA judgement stated: “The Court holds that the Directive does not envisage that the defendant itself must ensure payments to depositors in the Icesave branches in the Netherlands and the United Kingdom, in accordance with Articles 7 and 10 of the Directive, in a systemic crisis of the magnitude experienced in Iceland.”

What’s the core issue here is that Iceland guaranteed these accounts up to £16,300, but the British and Dutch cover the whole account, and demanded that Iceland pay the whole amount.

This is separate from the attempts to make the bondholders whole, for which there is no legal obligation whatsoever.

27 January 2013, 5:49 PM

Geithner As Sociopath: The Interview

In an interview with Liaquat Ahamed at The New Republic Timothy Geithner reveals his good German.

In response to the idea of justice, his response was that it, “wasn’t his thing.”

LA: One of the ways that people have figured out in the past to reconcile the politics was to go populist. That was what Roosevelt did. You, on the other hand, had been resolutely against that. You refer to it as Old Testament justice, implying that while it may be emotionally satisfying, it doesn’t serve any purpose.

TG: I never used that phrase as a pejorative description. I just used it as a simple shorthand to refer to the understandable need people had for justice. But the President didn’t ask me to come do this to be the architect of a political strategy. I never felt that was my thing. I had some views on the issue, but I didn’t give them much weight. I thought my job was to figure out the financial parts.

(emphasis mine)

Justice doesn’t matter, and notwithstanding his protestations, he ridiculed it as, “Old Testament justice”.

He knows that his job is to be the lick-spittle watchdog for the banksters.

Note however that the Cossacks work for the Czar

27 January 2013, 4:57 PM

Reid Never Intended to Reform the filibuster

The problem is that he has gone native:

Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid and Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell have come to a deal on filibuster reform. The deal is this: The filibuster will not be reformed. But the way the Senate moves to consider new legislation and most nominees will be.

“I’m not personally, at this stage, ready to get rid of the 60-vote threshold,” Reid (D-Nev.) told me this morning, referring to the number of votes needed to halt a filibuster. “With the history of the Senate, we have to understand the Senate isn’t and shouldn’t be like the House.”

What will be reformed is how the Senate moves to consider new legislation, the process by which all nominees — except Cabinet-level appointments and Supreme Court nominations — are considered, and the number of times the filibuster can be used against a conference report. You can read the full text of the compromise, which was sent out to Senate offices this morning, here (pdf).

But even those reforms don’t go as far as they might. Take the changes to the motion to proceed, by which the Senate moves to consider a new bill. Reid seemed genuinely outraged over the way the process has bogged down in recent years.Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid and Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell have come to a deal on filibuster reform. The deal is this: The filibuster will not be reformed. But the way the Senate moves to consider new legislation and most nominees will be.

“I’m not personally, at this stage, ready to get rid of the 60-vote threshold,” Reid (D-Nev.) told me this morning, referring to the number of votes needed to halt a filibuster. “With the history of the Senate, we have to understand the Senate isn’t and shouldn’t be like the House.”

What will be reformed is how the Senate moves to consider new legislation, the process by which all nominees — except Cabinet-level appointments and Supreme Court nominations — are considered, and the number of times the filibuster can be used against a conference report. You can read the full text of the compromise, which was sent out to Senate offices this morning, here (pdf).

But even those reforms don’t go as far as they might. Take the changes to the motion to proceed, by which the Senate moves to consider a new bill. Reid seemed genuinely outraged over the way the process has bogged down in recent years.

The Republicans have created a new reality in the Senate, and the older Democratic Senators do not realize that it’s not going back to the way it was before.

We need new leadership in the Senate.

24 January 2013, 9:27 PM

It’s a Petri Dish for Narcissistic Sociopaths

The filibuster stands largely unchanged:

The Senate enacted modest reforms to its filibuster rules with votes that kept bipartisan relations intact but left disappointed liberal groups fuming.

The reforms are the biggest changes to the Senate’s filibuster rules in decades but fell well short of drastic reforms demanded by labor unions and liberal-leaning advocacy groups.

The deal negotiated between Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid (D-Nev.) and Republican Leader Mitch McConnell (Ky.) provoked an outcry from liberal groups.

Passage of the deal sets to rest Reid’s threat, which he had wielded for months, to use the so-called “nuclear option” to change the Senate’s filibuster rules through a simple majority vote.

The enacted reforms do not include the implementation of the talking filibuster, which would require senators seeking to block legislation to actively hold the floor and debate. If debate stops, the pending matter moves to a simple majority vote, under this proposal.

Nor does it shift the burden of sustaining a filibuster onto the minority party by requiring senators to muster 41 votes to continue blocking legislation. Now the burden is on the majority to round up 60 votes to overcome a filibuster.

It’s streamlined a bit, but only a bit.

I’m depressed.

24 January 2013, 8:44 PM

Tobin Tax Progresses in Europe

The EU has begun to implement a plan to tax financial transactions:

A hotly contested tax on financial trades took a big step forward on Tuesday when European Union finance ministers allowed a vanguard of member states to proceed with the plan.

The so-called Robin Hood tax would apply to trading in stocks, bonds and derivatives. Although the tax would probably be small — one-tenth of a percentage point or less on the value of a trade — it could earn billions of euros for struggling European governments.

Algirdas Semeta, the European commissioner in charge of tax policy, called the decision “a major milestone in tax history” and said the levy could be imposed starting next year. But deep concerns about how it would work could still lead to delays.

The European Commission, the bloc’s policy-making arm, still needs to draft the final legislation, and the 11 states in favor of the law will have to give their unanimous approval before it becomes law — two more than the minimum required for legislation to be drafted.

A significant complication is opposition to the tax by Britain, which has the largest trading hub in Europe in the City of London. But because Britain has decided to stay outside the group of states applying the tax, its resistance would probably not stop the plan from moving ahead.

Among the 27 members of the European Union, the proposal has firm backing from Germany, France and nine other countries. Others might eventually support the idea, which is closely associated with James Tobin, a United States economist and Nobel laureate who suggested a version of it in the 1970s.

In addition to be a good source of revenue, it creates a large disincentive for short-term speculation by making it more expensive.

Here is hoping that this becomes a permanent fixture of the world economy.

24 January 2013, 6:52 PM

This Looks Promising

Obama has nominated former US Attorney Mary Jo White to head the S.E.C.

She has a reputation as a tough prosecutor, so hopefully there will be a bit less in the toothless consent decree area coming out of the agency.

23 January 2013, 8:28 PM

He Didn’t Tweet a Picture of His Penis to a Football Player’s Imaginary Penis, So it Does Not Matter………*

This explains why the media has largely ignored the revelation in the latest release of the Federal Reserve’s meeting minutes from 2007, which is that Timothy Geithner was leaking changes to the discount window to the big banks ahead of their official release:

In the summer of 2007, as storm clouds gathered over the world’s financial system, then-New York Federal Reserve President Timothy Geithner allegedly informed the Bank of America and other banks about the possibility the U.S. central bank would lower one of its critical interest rates, according to a senior Fed official.

Jeffrey Lacker, the head of the Richmond Fed, originally raised the allegation during a Fed conference call in August 2007, and he stuck to his 5-year-old claim against the current U.S. treasury secretary in a statement provided to Reuters on Friday.

“From conversations I had prior to the video conference call on August 16, 2007, I was aware of discussions among a few large banks about borrowing from their discount windows to support the asset backed commercial paper market,” Lacker said in the statement. “My understanding was that (New York Fed) President Geithner had discussed a reduction in the discount rate with these banks in connection with these initiatives.”

The folks at Zero Hedge were the first ones to notice this, and they nail it when they say, “[J]ust when we thought our opinion of the outgoing Treasury Secretary and former NY Fed head Tim Geithner, whose TurboTax incompetence is now legendary, couldn’t get lower, it got lower. Much lower.“

Here is the pertinent section from the transcript of the August 16, 2007 conference call:

MR. LACKER. If I could just follow up on that, Mr. Chairman.

CHAIRMAN BERNANKE. Yes, go ahead.

MR. LACKER. Vice Chairman Geithner, did you say that [the banks] are unaware of what we’re considering or what we might be doing with the discount rate?

VICE CHAIRMAN GEITHNER. Yes.

MR. LACKER. Vice Chairman Geithner, I spoke with Ken Lewis, President and CEO of Bank of America, this afternoon, and he said that he appreciated what Tim Geithner was arranging by way of changes in the discount facility. So my information is different from that.

CHAIRMAN BERNANKE. Okay. Thank you. Go ahead, Vice Chairman Geithner.

VICE CHAIRMAN GEITHNER. Well, I cannot speak for Ken Lewis, but I think they have sought to see whether they could understand a little more clearly the scope of their rights and our current policy with respect to the window. The only thing I’ve done is to try to help them understand—and I’m sure that’s been true across the System—what the scope of that is because these people generally don’t use the window and they don’t really understand in some sense what it’s about.

They also note that there was a sudden and unexplained jump of 50 points (4%) in the S&P 500 in just 1 hour. (Note that they also make a compelling circumstantial case that Geithner’s schedule indicates that he leaked this information)

BTW, as ZH also notes, the Fed’s 5 year delay in the release of records means that Geithner has outlasted the statute of limitations.

Awfully convenient, nu?

We won’t have a fix to our financial system until Geithner, and his mentor Robert Rubin are under criminal investigation for what they dud.

^*Not my words, but a slight reworking of sentiments expressed by JR at the Stellar Parthenon BBS.

21 January 2013, 8:45 PM

And Snatching Defeat from the Jaws of Victory………

Harry Reid on the filibuster.

Yes, he’s trying to preserve the silent filibuster:

Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid (D-Nev.) doesn’t plan to advance a “talking filibuster” proposal envisioned by liberals who want sweeping changes to the stodgy Senate.

But he still may invoke what critics call the “nuclear option” to change Senate rules that would limit the use of the filibuster, force senators to hold the floor in certain situations and require those stalling legislation to deliver 41 votes, several people familiar with the matter said Thursday.

Link

Un-Dirtyword-Believable.

He is concerned that the Republicans will be even more obstructionist if he requires a talking filibuster.

Hello? Mitch McConnell, the Minority Leader, filibustered his own bill, and have you seen the graph? (Note that the 2012 numbers are incomplete)

Seriously. They cannot get any more obstructionist.

What the f%$# is he thinking?

H/t AMERICAblog

18 January 2013, 9:55 PM

It’s Bank Failure Friday!!!

We have the 2^nd bank failure of the year, 1^st Regents Bank, of Andover, MN.

I’ll start putting out a graph with the next closing, there is just not enough data for good data pr0n right now.

15 January 2013, 8:52 PM

What a Surprise

Another Obama administration foreclosure mitigation program has descended into a morass of corruption and self-dealing:

No wonder the Fed and the OCC snubbed a request by Darryl Issa and Elijah Cummings to review the foreclosure fraud settlement before it was finalized early last week. What had leaked out while the Potemkin borrower reviews were underway showed them to be a sham, as we detailed at length in an earlier post. But even so, what actually took place was even worse than hardened cynics had imagined.

………

There are some issues that are highlighted in the piece, others that are implication that get somewhat lost in the considerable detail. The first, as stressed by Sheila Bair and other observers, is that the reviews were never designed to succeed. This is something we and others pointed out; this was all an exercise in show. The OCC had entered into these consent orders in the first place with the aim of derailing the 50 state attorney general settlement negotiations. This was all intended to be diversionary, but to make it look like it had some teeth, borrowers who were foreclosed on in 2009 and 2010 who thought they were harmed were allowed to request a review. If hard was found, they could get as much as $15,000 plus their home back if they had suffered a wrongful foreclosure, or if they home had already been sold, $125,000 plus any equity in the home. Needless to say, the forms were written at the second grade college level, making them hard to answer. A whistleblower for Wells Fargo reported that of 10,000 letters, harm was found in none because the responses were interpreted in such a way as to deny harm (for instance, if the borrower did not provide dates of certain incidents, those details were omitted from the assessment).

Read the whole thing.

15 January 2013, 7:31 PM

Not Something I Did Not Expect From Time Magazine

they just did an article about the advantages of state owned banks:

The American Great Plains are known for their expansive farm lands, endless horizons, and — in recent history — staunchly conservative politics. So it may come as a surprise that only state-owned bank in the U.S. (an institution more widely associated with communist China than the Republican Party) can be found in ruby-red, rural North Dakota.

That’s right, The Bank of North Dakota (BND) — the largest bank in the state by deposits — was founded by legislative mandate in 1919, and has been a mainstay of the North Dakotan economy since that time, mostly through partnering with community banks to provide loans for local businesses. And advocates of public banking are holding up the BND as an example of what government-owned banks can do for an economy.

………

Sure, there are many obstacles to launching publicly-owned financial institutions. Pulling state capital out of commercial institutions could prove to be disruptive to the current financial system. And proper controls need to be set up to avoid political considerations overwhelming proper analysis of lending opportunities. But North Dakota has avoided these pitfalls, and the NBD is an institution that has proven its ability to work alongside the private banking industry to help the state’s economy — one of the most successful in the nation in recent times — develop and grow.

The idea that this idea has gained enough currency to appear on the pages of Time Magazine is pretty remarkable.

Generally, the MSM will view something like North Dakota’s as an anachronism, or some sort of upper Midwest peculiarity, like something from the movie Fargo.

They are actually taking this seriously, and that’s a change.

13 January 2013, 7:25 PM

Dean Baker on Timothy Geithner, That’s Gonna Leave a Mark

This is positively brutal:

Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner’s departure from the Obama administration invites comparisons with Klemens von Metternich. Metternich was the foreign minister of the Austrian empire who engineered the restoration of the old order and the suppression of democracy across Europe after the defeat of Napoleon.

This was an impressive diplomatic feat – given the widespread popular contempt for Europe’s monarchical regimes. In the same vein, protecting Wall Street from the financial and economic havoc they brought upon themselves and the country was an enormous accomplishment.

Just go read it.