Timothy Geithner: Obama’s very convenient fall guy

While the Treasury Secretary gets pelted with mouldy cabbages, especially by Paul Krugman, the President charms the nation

FIRST POSTED MARCH 27, 2009

Since America is in its worst economic mess in 70 years and since President Obama's designated Mr Fixit is Treasury Secretary Tim Geithner, you'd think the Obama presidency would be in desperate shape. So why isn't it?

Mr Fixit is surely the most derided man running the US Treasury since Andrew Mellon cut spending and raised taxes amid the onset of the Great Depression in 1932, prompting the derisive ditty:

Hoover blew the whistle,
Mellon rang the bell,
Wall Street gave the signal,
And the country went to hell!

Even the bounce on Wall Street after the launch of Geithner's most recent effort to bail out the banks didn't stem the chorus of abuse. "Quite simply, the Timothy Geithner experience has been a disaster," proclaims a senior US senator, Connie Mack of Forida. "The Treasury Department is in disarray."

Nobel laureat Paul Krugman said the bail-out fills him with a sense of despair

Granted, Mack is a Republican, but Democrats can't muster much enthusiasm for their man. Michael Capuano, Democratic representative for Massachusetts, told ABC News: "At the moment, yeah. I mean, I have questions like anybody else, but let's be serious. He's still new on the job." Fifty economists surveyed by the Wall Street Journal gave Geithner a rating of 51 out of 100.

Most stentorian in his denunciations is Paul Krugman, a Princeton economics professor and winner of last year's Nobel prize for economics. Week after week from his pulpit at the New York Times, Krugman gives the Obama administration another walloping from the left for wimpish groveling to Wall Street.

Even before Geithner unveiled his latest bail-out (in an off-camera presentation planned to mitigate the Treasury Secretary's meagre rhetorical skills), Krugman was abusing its "zombie ideas". No doubt Geithner's insistence on the Hill on Thursday that he yearns for a legislative green light to discipline irresponsible bankers will be duly and, no doubt correctly, flayed by Krugman as mere persiflage.

Obama’s Mr Fixit is only a hair’s breadth away from becoming a stock figure on the comedy shows

In his official obituary for the bank bail-out plan, published in the Times on Monday - the same day as the scheme's official birth - Krugman announced somberly: "This is more than disappointing. In fact, it fills me with a sense of despair."

(Yes, this does sound a bit pompous. As connoisseurs of Martin Wolf and other prominent economic Cassandras down the decades know well, there's nothing like a widely read economics column to induce a tone of rotund self-importance. "I'm concerned about Europe," Krugman began a column grandly a few weeks ago.)

Of course Geithner got off on the wrong foot by coming to public attention during his nomination hearings before Congress for failure to pay certain federal taxes when he was at the International Monetary Fund, even though the IRS - a branch of the Treasury -

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For once the skilled politician Obama fails to see the political realities. Every pronouncement from Geitner or edict from the Government on the bailout sends everyone scuttling over to Krugman's web page for the verdict. Geitner has no credibility at all. Obama and his team are the players and Krugman has become the referee.

Posted by hidflect at 4:12am on March 28, 2009

What an awful insult - "..skilled politician..". He sold himself as the Circuit Breaker, the Untrammelled, the Hope and it turns out -wotta surprise!- he's just the (Spare) Change that changes nothing. Look at the time servers & seat warming apparatchiks with whom he' surrounded himself. No Change there. Whomsoever you vote for, the government wins. And, as always, its Comptrollers are the same.

Posted by allan kessing at 12:30pm on March 30, 2009