If you thought you could exhale after Congress finally passed that little bail-out plan last week, you might want to reconsider.
Aside from the fact that the stock market fell below 10,000 this morning for the first time since 2004, the government worked over the weekend to figure out who is going to head up this plan to assess and sell all those bad mortgage securities that apparently led to our current unraveling of the banking and investment banking in the first place.
And who appears to be at the top of the list? People with connections to the same investment banks that have failed or have been subsumed. Treasury Secretary Henry Paulson, formerly of Goldman Sachs himself, is choosing a 35-year-old former Goldman Sachs person who is also currently one of his key advisers at treasury, Neel Kashkari.
Wouldn’t you have thought a more neutral economist type would have been better for this, rather than someone with ties to the administration AND the investment banking community that got us into this mess?
Is it just me, or is the Bush administration giving the keys to the convertible back to the teenager who just drove it into the tree on the front lawn?
P.S. I see Jill and I are channeling the same mojo today. After I wrote this, I found her post with some more details on the youngster (and yes, I CAN call him that), his experience and his political contributions.
October 6th, 2008 at 10:32 am
As usual, you’re picking up on some very important but under-reported stuff here.
October 6th, 2008 at 10:54 am
Yes…absolutely the foxes are in the Hen house.
I support Obama, but he is going to be left with a big mess of unknown proportions.
Why can’t our Democratic Senators stand up to Bush and the craziness by protecting the American people?
If it fair to say that although they are not intimate with corporate America, they are friendly aquaintances?