Treasury Unveils $1T Plan to Clean Up Toxic Assets

Treasury secretary says he's done after election

(NEWSER) - Tim Geithner is pretty sure he's going to be joining the ranks of the jobless after the election: The Treasury secretary—the longest serving member of President Obama's economic team—tells Bloomberg that Obama is "not going to ask me to stay on, I’m pretty confident. I’m confident he’ll be president. But I’m also confident he’s going to have the privilege of having another secretary of the Treasury." The White House announced in August that Geithner would stay put through the election, amid Beltway rumblings that he would step down. More»

Geithner, Bernanke, others missed signs of the pending collapse

(NEWSER) - The Fed released transcripts from meetings in 2006 today that reveal just how badly its top officials blew it on the looming housing crisis, the New York Times reports. The industry was showing signs of distress, but the Fed's attitude boiled down to, eh, no big deal. The officials clearly did not grasp how "deeply intertwined the housing sector and financial markets had become," writes Binyamin Appelbaum. They would get the picture soon enough. Some highlights:

• Timothy Geithner (then with the New York Fed): “We think the fundamentals of the expansion going forward still look good," he said in December 2006. A few months earlier: “We just don’t see troubling signs yet of collateral damage, and we are not expecting much."

Banks took in billions of dollars, even as they claimed to be healthy

(NEWSER) - For more than two years, the Fed and the banks it bailed out during the 2007 to 2009 financial crisis have kept many of the details of the massive, multi-trillion-dollar bailout a secret. But, thanks to Freedom of Information Act requests, 29,000 pages of bailout details are pouring out of the Fed at last, and those details are explained in an extended and damning report by Bloomberg Markets magazine. Among the biggest revelations:

• $7.77 trillion: the total amount doled out in aid by the Fed to all the banks, as of March 2009, which Bloomberg notes surpasses 50% of the value of "everything produced in the US that year." In comparison, the $700 billion TARP "at least had some strings attached," says one House Democrat. "With the Fed programs, there was nothing."

Key figures deny harsh quotes, assertions of Obama weakness

(NEWSER) - The Obama administration is fighting back against allegations from Ron Suskind's coming book Confidence Men that the president's top advisers undermined his authority and ignored his orders, reports Politico . “This is not what I told the author, this is not what I believe, and anyone who knows me and my history of supporting this president as a candidate and in office knows this isn’t true,” said former communications director Anita Dunn , who was quoted in Suskind's book as saying the White House was "a genuinely hostile workplace to women." More»

New book says Obama's team routinely undermined him

(NEWSER) - In March 2009, in the throes of the financial crisis, Barack Obama told Tim Geithner to focus on a proposal to dissolve Citigroup—but the Treasury Secretary ignored him and never developed a plan, according to former Wall Street Journal reporter Ron Suskind’s new book Confidence Men. In the book, which was obtained early by the AP and the New York Times , Suskind writes that Obama’s “authority was being systematically undermined or hedged by his seasoned advisers.” More»