Tim Geithner's Pregnant and Citigroup Isn't Being Nationalized and Other Wild but True Stories

I don't know where to start -- the continued nationalization that they say isn't really nationalization of our the businesses and banks that the government allowed to consolidate into behemoths which they say are now so big that their shareholders are a better use of welfare dollars in this society than feeding hungry children. I guess there are three main points in that convoluted sentence I just wrote --

1. Does the Treasury and the elected officials it appoints (that's the way it works these days, right?) actually think anybody takes anything they say about the future seriously? Remember when Geithner and his boss used to tell us that the economy was fine over and over as it began to crumble in 2007? Remember when they told us the economy would stabilize if we'd just send Bear Stearn's shareholders two billion in welfare so that people wouldn't "lose confidence" in seeing a major bank like that wash out its shareholders even though Bear Stearns was insolvent and the shareholders were people who had been rich enough to risk their own money on that stock? Remember how they said they could fix it all if we'd only just this one time ignore contract law as they'd just give welfare of $160 billion to cover complicated derivative insurance contracts that AIG wrote for the hedge funds and other exclusive investor class counterparties who are the only ones who were buying that crap from AIG even though AIG had no money to pay for those contracts?

Remember back in June -- just before the tens of billions in welfare for bankers from Geithner became hundreds of billions on its way to trillions -- when Geithner told Portfolio magazine back in June as he started appropriating all this wealth from the private market and handing it out to the shareholders, lenders and counterparties of the banks that became completely completely insolvent WHILE HE WAS SUPPOSED TO BE REGULATING THEM:

“The Fed’s actions in this financial crisis will benefit Main Street more than they benefit Wall Street,” he asserts. He is certain that calamity was averted and that the people who gain most from the deal are not bankers but “the family who needs to borrow money to finance a house or send their child to college, or the individual trying to build enough savings for retirement, or the worker worried about losing her job.”

Italics and bold there mine. The upshot is -- the Treasury is owned by the banking syndicate they were supposed to be regulating and instead of punishing the liars and shareholders and lenders of those banks, he keeps giving them welfare and telling us it'll all work out for us.

Geithner and his predecessors have been wrong every step of the way and still is and always will be. They are idiots and they are destroying our economy and I don't even believe they're stupid enough to believe what they're saying any more....which leads us to my second point

2. Why isn't there more blame being placed at the foot of the Department of Justice for letting these companies consolidate into becoming "too big to fail"? I'm not a believer in the concept that the government should try to stop businesses from consolidating -- I figure that monopolies, like cartels, can only be maintained for a short time before faster-moving, smarter, creative business naturally destroy the monopoly -- take that, you Libertarian and Monetarist punks! (see Microsoft vs. Google (GOOG) -- remember when Softee (MSFT) was deemed an abusive monopolist? Turns out its competitors like Real Networks (RNWK) and Sun Microsystems (JAVA) failed because they suck. Google don't suck and now it’s the one having its resources diverted from being innovative and delivering great service as the DoJ investigates it for monopolistic tendencies…)

But the fact is that we have laws in this country in which the DoJ is very specifically and clearly supposed to keep businesses from consolidating and becoming “too powerful”, much less “too big too fail” so the people rich enough to own stock in the business or to have lent money to the business get welfare. How about some outrage and blame for the DoJ for Citigroup (C) and GM (GM) and TARP and the economic collapse and especially for providing rationalization for the endless preemptive bailouts/socialism/fascism we live under?

3. Same morning Treasury says “We’re not for nationalization of the banks”, they say “we might give billions in more welfare to the shareholders and lenders of Citigroup because Vikram and Prince were lying to you and Charlie Rose and take a 40% ownership stake in the company for the government….but that’s decidedly NOT nationalization, ok?”

Sorta’ nationalizing something is like sorta getting a girl pregnant. It’s either/or. And as I’ve said from day one – there ain’t no such thing as a sunshine capitalist.

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