Mess In Wall Street: How Powerful Really Is President Obama?

In our search for responsible business journalism, I came across this piece from Bloomberg (thanks Monroe): it’s a well-researched piece on Treasury Secretary Tim Geithner, his background and abilities.

The question is can Timmy be terrific or has the Wall Street connected Old Boys Network already kept him in his place. In 2004, which Bloomberg reporters pointed out, Timmy, as head of the New York Fed, wanted a clearinghouse market that would have served to monitor capital risk from the careening out of control mega-trillion dollar business in Humungous Bank & Broker (HB&B) credit-default swaps. Wall Street shackled him and then sent their man Henry Paulson, head of Goldman Sachs, into the White House to take control of Treasury.

The issue to be addressed today is how powerful really is President Obama? Is he the one giving Timmy his marching orders?

This is a serious question because yesterday (Thursday) at 11am ET, the President announced his administration’s plans for the healthcare industry and immediately the equity market plummeted, closing near the low of the day. Anything to do with healthcare, including hospitals, services, biotech, etc, tanked about -5.0% in five hours. That wasn’t Mr. Market speaking; that was HB&B. The same thing happened to the banks from the moment (11:00am ET that day too) that Timmy announced his financial system rescue plan on Feb. 10, following which the banking index (^BKX) plunged -13.9%.

Finally, the public is starting to see the nonsense that is going on here between Wall Street and Washington. To paraphrase Marshall McLuhan, the market is the message, and the talking heads are the CEOs of HB&B. If there was a backbone in the SEC, the public would be told the truth about where these sell programs initiate, and how much they are correlated to the demands of the CEOs of the money center banks.

Not only has HB&B screwed the financial system, by first destroying the credit system, which has in turn killed the economy, these bankers are screwing the taxpayer and now the capital market system. Enough already.

President Obama needs to stand up and be counted. He needs to engineer a new Securities Act and Regulations to replace those of 1933 and 1934, and he needs Timmy to be terrific so that the CDS mess can be put to bed.

Independent and objective business reporters need to get under the covers to name and shame the HB&B Old Boys Network who have taken control of 304 million Americans, and, I suspect, the US President, legislative branch and constitution.

Somebody needs to wake up America.

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