Posts Tagged ‘Geithner’
On Monday and Tuesday of this week, Treasury Secretary Geithner – and Secretary of State Clinton - meet with a high-level Chinese delegation. (Could someone please update the Treasury’s schedule of events? At 7am on Monday it still shows last week’s agenda; update, 9am, this is now fixed – thanks). According to official previews (i.e., the apparent [...]
Writing in the Washington Post this morning, Tim Geithner and Larry Summers outline a five point plan for dealing with the underlying problems in our financial system, entitled A New Financial Foundation. The authors are not completely clear on what they think caused the current crisis, but you can back out some points from their reasoning – [...]
France in the 1960s and 1970s was the source of a tremendous amount of new philosophical, literary, and critical thinking – Foucault, Derrida, Lévi-Strauss, Baudrillard, Barthes, etc. But in my opinion, the most important member of that intellectual generation was the sociologist Pierre Bourdieu. In Distinction, Bourdieu’s best-known work, he described how economic class is [...]
This morning, by coincidence, there are parallel hearings on Capitol Hill dealing with the nature of our banking system and attempts to stabilize it. In the Cannon House Office Building, starting at 9:30am, the Joint Economic Committee will hear from Thomas Hoenig, Joseph Stiglitz, and me, on whether Big Finance is too big to save (see [...]
Leaving aside the question of subsidies, which has gotten piles of attention on the Internet, Simon and I are skeptical that the Geithner Plan will achieve its basic objective: getting enough toxic assets off of bank balance sheets to restore the financial system to normal functioning. We discuss this in today’s Los Angeles Times op-ed, [...]
I finally got around to listening to Tim Geithner’s interview with Adam Davidson for Planet Money. (Simon already commented on it.) I had two main reactions. 1. Around the 14:30 mark, in response to a question about the problem of valuing bank assets, Geither said this:
Secretary Geithner spoke with NPR’s Adam Davidson today and the result, on the Planet Money podcast, is a helpful guide to official thinking. The Secretary’s best line, at around the 18 minute mark is, ”If you underestimate the problem; if you do too little, too late; if you don’t move aggressively enough; if you are not [...]
At management team meetings at my old company, there was a slogan I was known for: “No wishful thinking.” I would trot it out whenever I felt like our expectations for the future (say, our sales projections, or our product delivery dates) were being influenced by our desires for the future. Let’s say, for example, [...]
When you cut through the technical details and the marketing distractions, sorting out the US banking fiasco comes down to one, and only one, question. How tough are you willing to be on the people who control the country’s large banks?
Counting down to the announcement of the Geithner plan, the New York Times has this account of how it came into being (and why it should be called the “Geithner plan,” although maybe Larry Summers is hiding behind him): In the end, Mr. Geithner largely prevailed in opposing tougher conditions on financial institutions that were [...]
At 11am this morning, from the Cash Room at the Treasury, Secretary Geithner will lay out his vision (and hopefully some convincing details) regarding how to get the US financial system back on its feet. What should we listen for as indications that this is heading in the right direction?
Next week, Tim Geithner will have an opportunity to explain his plans for the financial system (Cash Room of the Treasury, Monday, 12:30pm), and defend these plans in front of the Senate Banking Committee (Tuesday, starting at 10am) and Senate Budget Committee (Wednesday, also from 10am). Here are the questions (in bold) we would ask him. [...]
What are your expectations for the impending Geithner Bank Plan? Listening carefully to the messaging from the top, you are probably hoping for an increase in bank lending. In fact, over the past few weeks, Congressional leaders (e.g., at the Senate Budget Committee hearing last week) and the President (e.g., see the penultimate paragraph of [...]
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Firefighter Arson And Our Macroeconomic Policymakers
August 27, 2009 in Commentary
Tags: Bernanke, Firefighter arson, Geithner, greenspan, Summers
Firefighter arson is a serious problem. The U.S. Fire Administration, part of Homeland Security, concluded in 2003, “A very small percentage of otherwise trustworthy firefighters cause the very flames they are dispatched to put out” (p.1). Illustrative and shocking anecdotes are on pp. 9-15 of that report, as well as here and here. Macroeconomic policy [...]