GEITHNER’S REAL BOSSES KEEP CALLING

[Donnachaidh]

http://larryflynt.com/?p=705

WALL STREET’S MOST INFLUENTIAL CEOs HAVE OBAMA’S TREASURY SECRETARY ON SPEED DIAL, AND IT PAYS.

by Robert Scheer
from HUSTLER Magazine – January 2010

When Timothy Geithner headed the Federal Reserve Bank of New York, he was very good at mealtime, particularly with the Wall Street fat cats he was supposed to be governing. The details of his endless private dining with the likes of Sanford Weill, Robert Rubin and other big bankers responsible for the economic meltdown only came out after President Obama named him Treasury Secretary—and in response to a Freedom of Information lawsuit.

“An examination of Mr. Geithner’s five years as president of the New York Fed, an era of unbridled and ultimately disastrous risk-taking by the financial industry, shows that he forged unusually close relationships with executives of Wall Street’s giant financial institutions,” the New York Times reported. “His actions, as a regulator and later a bailout king, often aligned with the industry’s interests and desires, according to interviews with financiers, regulators and analysts and a review of Federal Reserve records.”

You would have thought that the embarrassing disclosures of how tight this guy was with the banking bandits would have led him to change his social habits—and it has: Instead of private dining encounters, he now schmoozes the bankers during incessant phone calls. Of course, we only learned this when the Wall Street Journal and other news organizations forced the information public through another FOIA lawsuit.

Under the headline “Wall Street on Geithner’s Speed Dial,” the WSJ reported that “Geithner has kept frequent contact with an exclusive group of Wall Street executives since taking the helm at Treasury, speaking most often with top officials from Goldman Sachs Group Inc., J.P. Morgan Chase Co., CitiGroup Inc. and BlackRock Inc.” And, in fact, he logged far more time talking with Lloyd Blankfein, the CEO of Sachs, than he did with Barney Frank and Chris Dodd, the two leaders of Congress to whom he was supposed to be reporting.


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