Geithner Seeks Power To Seize Financial Firms
Appearing before the House Financial Services Committee today, Treasury Sec. Tim “Turbo Tax” Geithner asked Congress to grant the White House the unprecedented authority to seize non-bank financial institutions if those firms are “perceived” as tottering toward failure.
“As we have seen with AIG, distress at large, interconnected, non-depository financial institutions can pose systematic risks just as distress at banks can. The administration proposes legislation to give the U.S. government the same basic set of tools for addressing financial distress at non-banks as it has in the bank context,” Geithner told the committee.
“AIG highlights broad failures of our financial system,” Geithner told the House Financial Services Committee. “We must ensure that our country never faces this situation again.”
What?!? After having chosen to bail out this miserable firm while letting Lehman fail, the bumbling architect is now arguing that the Obama administration needs greater control of all financial institutions?
This is a very bad omen…nothing amusing about it. Not one bit.