Defending Geithner

I caught the Timolator on ABC's This Week, and he did a pretty good job of defending himself and the administration. I certainly wish the guy asking the questions had been Paul Krugman instead of George S., but oh well.

Meanwhile, Brad Delong weighs in with a good defense: Tim Geithner Is Not a Tool of Wall Street (Brad DeLong quoting Ed Luce quoting Brad DeLong)

Nor, says Mr DeLong, is it fair to paint Mr Geithner as a creature of Wall Street. “Hank Paulson is a man who grew up in American finance and cannot imagine a world in which America does well and its financial sector does badly,” he says. “Tim Geithner, by contrast, is a bureaucrat and a policymaker. He has never pulled down a multibillion-dollar bonus. They are not the same type of people.”

He meant multi-million dollar bonus.

It's certainly fair to claim that Tim G. is not a creature of Wall Street like Paulson, Corzine, or Bob Rubin, but he has spent a lot of time working in its neighborhood.

Geithner did make the case that the appropriate laws to deal with AIG were not on the books (and still aren't). The blame for that is shared by Bush, Paulson, Bernanke, Greenspan (the economic Godfather of deregulated finance) and Congress, Congress, and, oh yeah, Congress.

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