Last year, it was revealed that Tim Geithner worked to have restrictions on Wall Street bonuses removed from the stimulus bill. Now, new revelations show that Geithner also had AIG withhold information about their payments to other banks during the bailout process:
The Federal Reserve Bank of New York, then led by Timothy Geithner, told American International Group Inc. to withhold details from the public about the bailed-out insurer's payments to banks during the depths of the financial crisis, e-mails between the company and its regulator show.
AIG said in a draft of a regulatory filing that the insurer paid banks, which included Goldman Sachs Group Inc. and Societe Generale SA, 100 cents on the dollar for credit-default swaps they bought from the firm. The New York Fed crossed out the reference, according to the e-mails, and AIG excluded the language when the filing was made public on Dec. 24, 2008.
That is bad enough. The Treasury Department's offensive response to these revelations shows just how clueless and pro-Wall Street they actually are (emphasis mine):
The Treasury's response this morning is, essentially, no harm no foul. Meg Reilly, a Treasury spokeswoman, released a statement: "In the transaction at the heart of this dispute... the FRBNY made a loan of $25 billion which is on track to be paid back in full with interest so that taxpayers will be made whole. Somehow that fact that the government's loan is 'above water' gets lost in all the consternation despite its mention on page 2 of the SIG-TARP report (and weekly updates on the FRBNY's web site."
Here is my response to this response, which is hardly the first of its kind around the nation: fuck you. Made whole? Seriously, fuck you. And then fuck you again.
Geithner and the Treasury Department seem to think that the only thing Americans care about in this deal is that AIG pays back their loans. What they care about is that the economy was crashed by people like AIG. What they care about is that these fuckers are not only not being punished for fucking millions of people, but that they are getting deals from the federal government that preserve their bonuses and offer them interest rates no individual American could ever receive.
Tens of millions of Americans are facing crushing debt payments because interest rates on the loans they received are so high. They are losing their jobs. They are losing their homes. They would love to get the kind of help that people like AIG got. Loans with little or no interest would be fantastic. Loans like that could actually be repaid by Americans facing crippling mortgage, college, credit card and other debts.
However, the only people getting deals with loans large enough, and at low enough interest rates, and with direct-possibly illegal--assistance from the government, are the same fuckers who crashed the economy. Those people are being helped by the government. Everyone else is still suffering. It reeks of an unholy alliance between big business and big government designed to frock over everyone else.
Made whole? Fuck you. You just don't fucking get it at all.
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