Bill Black is one of the rare good guys: someone who knows all about the inner workings of financial firms and their crimes but who cannot be bought by them and has been in the trenches fighting for lawfulness and prosecution in the sector most of his life. Here is his bio.
Former NY Fed head and then Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner has a new book out called “Stress Test” in which he follows a now long tradition of rewriting one’s history of harmful acts by explaining how he did nothing wrong and anyway everything was all in the best interests of the country. Bill Black has written a series of worthwhile articles in response to the partial truths and blatant fabrications laid out by Tiny Tim in his new book. Here is a sampling:
“Geithner is a target rich environment for critics and he has a gift for saying things that are obviously depraved, but which he thinks are worthy of a public servant.
He did vastly more harm to the Nation as the President of the New York Fed than he did as Treasury Secretary. He was supposed to regulate most of the largest (and most criminal) bank holding companies – and failed so completely that he testified to Congress that he had never been a regulator and that the problem in banking leading up to the crisis was excessive regulation. His statement that he was never a regulator was truthful – but you’re not supposed to admit it, and you’re certainly not supposed to be proud of it. Geithner, Greenspan, and Bernanke are the three Fed leaders who could have prevented the entire crisis by being even modestly effective regulators.
…as the recent leaks by the Department of Justice (DOJ) reveal, it was Geithner and his subordinate officials at the Office of the Comptroller of the Currency (OCC – a bureau within Treasury) who led the chorus of alarm that led an already cowardly DOJ to adopt the infamous “too big to prosecute” doctrine that Attorney General Eric Holder is now desperately seeking to walk back. Every reference by Geithner to elite bank fraud is designed to mock anyone that would take it seriously and try to hold the elite bank officers accountable for their crimes. Geithner makes his childish, sneering tone on the subject obvious to even the most casual reader with phrases such as “Barofsky’s[auditor for the TARP program] desire to prevent perfidy” in addition to mocking the entire concept that fraud was important enough to warrant providing SIGTARP’s LEOs with even the most basic, essential forms of personal protection to reduce the risk that they would be maimed or killed in the performance of their duties….”
See the whole article: Geithner’s Single Most Revealing Sentence
