Blog Buzz: Fire Geithner

Tim Geithner, the guy who is in charge of IRS, once defaulted on paying taxes once. That is reason enough not to have him as the Treasury Secretary. But there is growing evidence that Geithner is complicit in a scheme that favored Goldman Sachs and the ilk at the expense of US tax payers. If his AIG memo wasn’t bad enough, now his name is prominently heard in connection with massive accounting and other fraud perpetrated at Lehman Brothers.

Blogs are a-buzz with calls for firing Geithner on the Prop-105 discovery in Lehman 2000+ page report. How bad is Lehman bankruptcy report for Geithner? Tim Cavanaugh opines:

So much depends upon a likely. Speaking as somebody who believes Geithner must not only be removed from office but be imprisoned like Magneto in a metals-free environment where there will be no conductivity for his brain waves of pure bamboozlement, I’m not sure the court report makes a very strong case against him. Smith calls for more evidence gathering, and huzzah to that.

But in his brief appearances in the 336-page report, Geithner’s main concern seems to be with preventing a panic over the diseased state of Lehman. Geithner not only acknowledges his efforts at concealment, but seems to believe they were the right thing to do:

In addition to the losses Lehman would incur by selling “sticky” assets at firesale prices, deleveraging also raised the additional problems of market perception and valuation.3187 As Secretary Timothy Geithner explained to the Examiner, selling “sticky” assets at discounts could hurt Lehman by revealing to the market that Lehman “had a lot of air in [its] marks” and thereby further draining confidence in the valuation of the assets that remained on Lehman’s balance sheet.3188

Kar Denninger goes a bit farther in saying Geitherner should be fired, if not, Obama should be impeached:

Further, how is it that we can have a Treasury Secretary who, it appears, had either full or constructive knowledge of the gaming that Lehman was undertaking and yet did nothing about it, leading directly and proximately to the market meltdown in 2008.

Literal trillions of dollars were lost due to this malfeasance and misfeasance, along with millions of jobs.  Yet one of the “watchdog” agencies involved in banking clearing and regulation knew about it, did nothing, and the head of that organization now runs Treasury.

It has been my contention that Geithner was largely responsible for willful blindness in the lead-up to this mess since it began.  We now have a “smoking gun” making a clear and nearly-impossible to refute case.

I call upon prosecutors both at a State and Federal level to look into this for potential prosecution under both civil and criminal Racketeering statutes, including their counterparty banks and FRBNY.

Tim Geithner must be fired by The President.  If he refuses, then following the election in November, when I fully expect that Republicans will re-take both the House and Senate, impeachment proceedings must be brought against President Obama for his willful and intentional refusal to remove the person who this paper makes clear could have put a stop to the collapse for nearly six months and yet failed to do so.