Late Change In Course Hobbled Rollout Of Geithner's Bank Plan

by Neil Irwin and Binyamin Appelbaum - February 17th, 2009 - The Washington Post

Just days before Treasury Secretary Timothy F. Geithner was scheduled to lay out his much-anticipated plan to deal with the toxic assets imperiling the financial system, he and his team made a sudden about-face.

According to several sources involved in the deliberations, Geithner had come to the conclusion that the strategies he and his team had spent weeks working on were too expensive, too complex and too risky for taxpayers.

They needed an alternative and found it in a previously considered initiative to pair private investments and public loans to try to buy the risky assets and take them off the books of banks. There was one problem: They didn't have enough time to work out many details or consult with others before the plan was supposed to be unveiled.

What is amazing about this liberal press whitewash of the problems with tax cheat Tim Geithner's plans? Reading the article makes it clear the new plan, not announced with any detail, is as half baked and unclear as the original plan which was abandoned.

Like the plan that Bush Treasury Secretary Paulson implemented with Geithner's assistance in Phase I, it does not address any of the basic flaws in home lending that led to the original crisis. Nor does it undo the panic that has been created in the financial markets because of the incompetence with which the crisis has been handled to date.

The reason is simple. The Democrats who created the CRA and its remodled Clinton rules to force home loans to unqualified borrowers, have no intention of losing the power to force loans to minorities. They think that as soon as the crisis is over, they can go back to business as usual. They have successfully argued that their interference in home lending was "unregulated" lending and they intend to more tightly control lending in the future.

This socialistic impulse based on calling black white and white black is what they call "change".