Over the last week and a half of scandal-mongering, most people on the left have agreed on the basic contours of the story. Benghazi isn't a "scandal," because tragic as the killings there were, there's no evidence of malfeasance on the part of Obama administration—no crimes, no cover-up. (And no, interagency bickering over talking points does not constitute a cover-up). The IRS, on the other hand, is potentially scandalous, there having almost certainly been inappropriate behavior on the part of some of the agency's employees, but it doesn't seem to reach up to the White House. And the Justice Department's subpoenaing of phone logs from the Associated Press isn't a "scandal" as much as a disagreement over policy.
I’m trying to remain optimistic that the president and congressional Democrats will hold their ground over the next month as we approach the so-called “fiscal cliff.”
But leading those negotiations for the White House is outgoing Secretary of Treasury Tim Geithner, whom Monday’s Wall Street Journaldescribed as a “pragmatic deal maker” because of “his long relationship with former Treasury Secretary Robert Rubin, for whom balancing the budget was a priority over other Democratic touchstones.”
It may be the peak of vacation season in Europe, but the continent’s fiscal crisis has not taken a break. Last week, Wolfgang Schäuble, the powerful German finance minister, took time out from his holiday to have a sit-down with his American counterpart, Tim Geithner, in the North Sea island of Sylt. The last-minute meeting was organized at Geithner’s request. Less than a hundred days from the U.S. presidential election, it highlighted—as if more evidence were necessary—the Obama administration’s concern about how developments in the Eurozone could affect the vote come November 6.
President Barack Obama startled handicappers by selecting Dartmouth President Jim Yong Kim as the U.S. candidate to lead the World Bank rather than the reported front-runner Larry Summers, Obama's former National Economic Council director.
The Korean-born Kim is a medical doctor, anthropologist, and MacArthur fellow, best known for his pioneering work to fight HIV and tuberculosis in the Third World. Kim helped develop treatments for drug-resistant TB, and then successfully pushed to reduced the cost of anti-TB drugs. He is close associate of Dr. Paul Farmer, the lead founder of Partners in Health and subject of Tracy Kidder’s 2003 book, Mountains Beyond Mountains.
In a surprise move, President Barack Obama is nominating Dartmouth College President Jim Yong Kim to head the World Bank. The announcement will be made by Obama, Treasury Secretary Tim Geithner, and Secretary of State Hillary Clinton—who first recommended Kim for the post—in the Rose Garden later today.
Fears that the euro crisis will cross the Atlantic have started to ease after European leaders took precautions to stave off default in Greece and shore up other ailing economies. “In the past few months, financial stresses in Europe have lessened, which has contributed to an improved tone of financial markets around the world, including in the United States,” said Federal Reserve chair Ben Bernanke. Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner agreed: “The European economies at the center of the crisis have made very significant progress.”
Why does Larry Summers have more lives than a cat?
He was fired as president of Harvard, did not exactly serve President Obama brilliantly as economic policy czar, and now seems to be in line for the presidency of the World Bank, a post traditionally chosen by the president of the United States.
The deadline for the selection is this Friday, March 23. The appointment is supposed to be made official at the April meeting of the World Bank.
Earlier this month, the White House leaked a short list of three names, Summers plus U.N. Ambassador Susan Rice and Massachusetts Senator John Kerry—neither of whom want the job. Brilliantly subtle signaling, that.
The sophisticated political observer doesn’t need public opinion polls to weigh the odds of President Obama’s re-election. Economic indicators drive voters, and if the president and his party come up short in November, the recriminations won’t be aimed at campaign headquarters in Chicago but at the staffers and wonks tasked with turning around the American economy.
The Escape Artists: How Obama’s Team Fumbled the Recovery, provides just that opportunity. Noam Scheiber, an editor at The New Republic, susses out the Obama administration’s most important internal debates to find exactly where the supposed dream team of economic wonks failed.
Treasury Secretary Tim Geithner, chiding Wall Street for trying to undermine enforcement of the Dodd-Frank financial-reform bill, is trying to rewrite history. He would have us believe that regulators lacked the power to prevent the financial collapse. In fact, they had plenty of power. The problem was that Geithner and company were in industry’s pocket, and didn’t use the power they had.
Writing in today's Wall Street Journal, in an op-ed piece titled “Financial Crisis Amnesia,” Geithner contends:
The Federal Reserve, in a remarkable acknowledgement of how soft the economy is, has disclosed a vote of its open market committee to keep short term interest rates close to zero for at least three more years—until late 2014. This means that the Fed will keep pumping money into the economy by purchasing bonds at whatever level is required.
Would Barack Obama have appointed Tim Geithner as Treasury secretary had he been privy to the minutes of the Federal Reserve’s meetings with its regional leaders, which became public yesterday? Geithner, who headed the New York Fed at the time, comes off as utterly clueless about the potential for the housing bubble to plunge the economy into recession, much less the Great Recession.
Bill Clinton offered his take Tuesday for how he would solve the debt ceiling: Oder the Treasury to keep issuing debt under the 14th Amendment, which states: "The validity of the public debt of the United States, authorized by law, including debts incurred for payment of pensions and bounties for services in suppressing insurrection or rebellion, shall not be questioned." Some have interpreted this Civil War-era language to mean the debt ceiling is unconstitutional, and that it is within Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner's power to continue issuing debt to
If you've visited the Prospect's homepage recently, you'll have noticed a clock counting down to midnight today. By the end of the day the federal debt will reach its congressionally set limit of $14.294 trillion. Does that mean the government will default on its debt today? Not quite. Treasury Secretary Tim Geithner has a box of tools that allows him to reconfigure the government's books, temporarily keeping the lights on and still paying creditors interest on government bonds. Geithner has stated that he can continue tinkering with government operations until Aug.
