Geithner Defends TARP, Says Loss To Taxpayers Will Be $109 Billion (VIDEO SUMMARY, Transcript)
PBS Video: Elizabeth Warren & Tim Geithner square off -- June 22, 2010
Treasury Department Secretary Timothy Geithner defends TARP before Elizabeth Warren and the Congressional Oversight Panel in testimony earlier this afternoon.
Solid summary clip runs 2 minutes. Plenty of soundbites.
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Treasury Secretary Tim Geithner defended the government's bailout of the financial system on Tuesday, saying it has been a "critical" part of the economic recovery and will ultimately cost less than expected.
Geithner is testifying before the Congressional Oversight Panel, the main watchdog for the Troubled Asset Relief Program, or TARP. The government enacted TARP in 2008 at the height of the financial crisis. The program is due to expire in October.
While the economy remains challenged, Geithner said TARP and other "extraordinary actions" taken to combat the financial meltdown "have helped stabilize the financial system and restore economic growth."
Geithner acknowledged that some of the government's efforts were "unpopular." The program, initially funded at $700 billion, was used to pour billions of tax dollars in to troubled Wall Street banks, insurance giant American International Group and the auto industry.
But he argued that such steps were "essential" to contain the crisis and that they have improved conditions for homeowners, consumers, businesses, and state and local governments.
Geithner said that the final cost of the program is expected to be significantly less than originally anticipated. In August 2009, the Treasury projected that TARP would increase federal deficits by $341 billion. As of Tuesday, the program is expected to cost $105 billion, Geithner said.
The Congressional Budget Office estimated in March that TARP's overall cost will be $109 billion.
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Jun 22, 2010 at 11:20 PM
Reader Comments (6)
http://www.washingtontimes.com/news/2010/jun/22/geithner-bank-bailout-buys-taxpayer-gains/
"Millions of Americans are still looking for work and are suffering from the damage of a deep recession. The impact of this crisis will be lasting," he said in prepared testimony to Congress.
While heralding progress in unwinding government stimulus spending, Geithner stressed the United States was still not out of the woods.
http://www.breitbart.com/article.php?id=CNG.7a5d51a78d5d2cd026aaf0637654beb9.c61&show_article=1
Kurt Nimmo
Infowars.com
June 22, 2010
The farce that is the war in Afghanistan is coming apart at the seams. General Stanley McChrystal’s sharp comments about Obama, Biden, and the administration published by Rolling Stone are not so much about disrespect, as the script-reading corporate media talking heads would have it, but rather about a policy in disarray in Afghanistan.
Obama the wunderbar teleprompter reader (and little else) is instructed to push the completely untenable prospect that the United States can win the so-called war in Afghanistan, a country often referred to as the graveyard of empires. The British, the Russians, Alexander the Great, and Genghis Khan either fell to the Afghans or made painful concessions. The British suffered one of their greatest military defeats in the Khyber. 16,500 British soldiers and civilians, retreating after defeat in Kabul, were slaughtered by the Afghans. One person was spared to tell the story.
The establishment knows it cannot “win” in Afghanistan and the claim the U.S. military is there to defeat the Taliban and al-Qaeda is nothing but transparent propaganda.
Afghanistan is a black hole sucking up men and machinery for the sake of death merchant profiteers. It is valuable real estate to be held — not conquered — real estate where opium grows for the sake of CIA off-the-books operating capital funding covert wars against enemies of the global elite. The fantastic profits earned from opium also flood the coffers of the masters of the casino economy on Wall Street. As Catherine Austin Fiits has documented, without this influx of laundered underground and illicit money Wall Street would have collapsed long ago.
After the so-called Afghanistan assessment was supposedly leaked to the CIA’s favorite newspaper last year — the report recommended in Pentagon-speak securing the population, aiding in providing good governance, building and mentoring the Afghan security forces — McChrystal threatened to resign if he was not provided with resources to accomplish the mission.
http://www.infowars.com/general-mcchrystals-burning-contempt-for-the-puppet-obama/
Abolish legal tender protection of paper money!
Legal tender protection of fiat money must for once and all be declared unconstitutional. This measure is necessary to remove coercion whereby the government can force citizens to provide services against irredeemable promises to pay.
Such coercion was first legalized in France and Germany in the year 1909, five years before the outbreak of World War I. These countries wanted to make sure that their military and civil service can be paid in chits, thus putting the defense and labor force at the disposal of the government, independently of the state of budget and collection of taxes. In this way the electorate was denied its say in deciding whether the planned war is worth the blood and treasure to expend, or when to stop a war already in progress. World War I could have come to an early end but for the legal tender laws. As soon as treasuries had run out of gold, the belligerent governments would have been forced to make peace, unless the electorate agreed to pay for continuing the bloodshed and destruction of property in the form of higher taxes and sending more young men to their death in the trenches.
If they had an ounce of intelligence they would not be tools of the bankers and would be aiming their weapons at Basel, the City of London and Wall Street.
http://www.dailypaul.com/node/138385
Useful dupes, doing the bidding of the bankers for financial gain ... and who benefits? Not the soldiers! Their banking masters.
McChrystal is better off not being the bankers' dog. Leave it to a politician such as Petraeus.
"Go kill Islami peasant kids!"
"Yes master, yes master"
"Good dog!"
THIS IS A GREAT WRITE UP
America Can't Solve Crises Because It's a Company-Owned Town
by Glen Ford
The United States can no longer engage effectively in "nation-building" in the one place on Earth it has a right and duty to do so: at home. These are the lessons of the 2010 Gulf oil catastrophe, the 2008 financial meltdown and the 2005 Katrina horror -- disasters that history will rightfully conflate as symptomatic of the fundamental crisis of the rule of Capital. The U.S. has become a company town of speculative and extraction enterprises whose social and physical geography the rulers relentlessly appropriate, monetize and despoil - all with obscene abandon.
http://www.commondreams.org/view/2010/06/23-5