“In the six weeks since Mr. [Timothy F.] Geithner took over as Treasury secretary, he and a skeleton crew of unofficial senior advisers have been racing to make decisions that will shape the future of the banking, insurance, housing and automobile industries.
But even as he maintains a frenetic pace — unveiling plans, testifying before Congress and negotiating new bailouts with the likes of Citigroup, General Motors and the American International Group — there are signs that events are getting ahead of him.
Administration officials say they are postponing their plan to produce a detailed road map for overhauling the nation’s financial regulatory system by April, in time for the Group of 20 meeting in London. Though officials say they will still develop basic principles in time for the meeting, the plan will not include much detail.
Treasury officials are also still scrambling to decide details of their plan to buy up as much as $1 trillion in toxic assets from the nation’s banks, one month after being widely criticized for presenting a plan that lacked any specifics on how it would work.
Analysts say it is far too early to know if Mr. Geithner and his team will be effective.”
Edmund L. Andrews and Stephen Labaton, “Geithner, With Few Aides, Is Scrambling”, The New York Times (8 March 2009).
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/03/09/business/economy/09treasury.html?_r=2&hp
Edmund L. Andrews and Stephen Labaton write for The New York Times and the International Herald Tribune.
This is absolutely frightening. One man -- one man -- and a few other faceless creatures reporting to him are supposed to do all this. By themselves, no less, perhaps consulting now and then with a Congresscritter or two and chatting over the phone with a couple of empty suits from the Fed and the Executive Branch. Are we to understand that a few people who no one heard of a year or two ago are going to spend trillions of dollars any way they want and in doing so determine the economic fate of over 300,000,000 people and affect the lives of every person on the planet?
It is not just that this is an impossible task, however frantically they work. It is the fact that the task cannot be anything other than the work of a dictator -- or in this case, a hireling reporting to someone who must think of himself as the country rather than as a servant of the people seeking their consent in making critical decisions affecting its future.
How did it come to pass that Americans have lost control of their fate and been reduced to this state of affairs?
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