GM II

This is more of a trial balloon than established fact, though it is interesting in its implications.

DETROIT — President Obama has dropped the idea of appointing a single, powerful “car czar” to oversee the revamping of General Motors and Chrysler and will instead keep the politically delicate task in the hands of his most senior economic advisers, a top administration official said Sunday night.

Mr. Obama is designating the Treasury secretary, Timothy F. Geithner, and the chairman of the National Economic Council, Lawrence H. Summers, to oversee a presidential panel on the auto industry. Mr. Geithner will also supervise the $17.4 billion in loan agreements already in place with G.M. and Chrysler, said the official, who insisted on anonymity.

[...]

“We’re going to need a restructuring of these companies,” the adviser, David Axelrod, said on “Meet the Press” on NBC. He added that a turnaround of the companies would “require sacrifice not just from the auto workers but also from creditors, from shareholders and the executives who run the company.”

Considering that the National Economic Council includes my boss, who just laid me off, I'll go ahead and assume that their advice will be to break the union.

However, the thrust of this post is that this will mean either the bank plan; taxpayers assume all the bad stuff, including retiree pensions and the like, and GM gets off scot free, or it's nationalized, and taxpayers assume all the bad stuff anyway. I really don't see any middle ground. Unlike the banks, I don't see anybody else in the market who is in the position to buy up GM's assets, even at pennies on the dollar, so unless Buffet wants to take a crack at making cars, I think you pretty much have to nationalize the company.

Dispatches from stupid sumbitchin tax cheats.

Pathetic.

Administration officials were greeted with sarcasm and laughter Monday night when they briefed lawmakers and congressional staff on Treasury Secretary Tim Geithner's new financial-sector bailout project, according to people who were in the room.

When Congress of all people laugh at you for mismanagement, you know you done fucked up.

Inexplicably, the administration has severe anal-cranial impaction.

sigh.

This is going to be a long four-year scrum.

Wow.

Good start to the market today, in preparation of the official announcement that our economy is run by a criminal sumbitch assclown.

Assclown announcement.

Later today we'll find out the extent of how the new boss is the same as the old boss.

Geithner is a goddamn criminal.

Get out of my head.

Krugman. Watkins. Stop it, or give me credit! First a Nobel laureate, now the goddamn blog of Harvard Business.

Given what [Obama] and his advisers know and believe, what should we be told and when should we be told it?

Let's suppose, for example, that the following is "the truth" about the US economy. What follows is pretty gloomy, but it's a simple extrapolation of the results of a compelling new study of the aftermath of major financial crises presented by respected economists Carmen Reinhart and Kenneth Rogoff at a recent annual meeting of the American Economic Association. They made an equally bold and correct prediction at the same meeting last January that we were on the verge of a financial crisis. (The Economist is currently running an active discussion on the topic).

Unless Obama plans to budget for nothing but medicaid, unemployment, welfare, food stamps and free abortions, he can't tell a goddamn soul that he knows more than anyone else. That's why he needs Geithner, who knows how the game is played.

Geithner it is.

Ushering in a new era of accountability, our new Treasury Secretary is Timothy Geithner!

Fun Facts:

• Timothy Geithner is a crooked sumbitch tax cheat!
• Timothy Geithner brought you the crooked, sumbitchin' TARP!
• Timothy Geithner's housekeeper was in the country illegally!
• Timothy Geithner tried to claim his child's summer camp as day-care expenses!

While I am of the opinion that you need a real crook to lie, cheat, and steal our way into economic recovery, we probably should have picked one that wasn't so bad at it.