Archives

As TBM's own Karim Bardeesy noted back in February, the Treasury Department must be a lonely place--if their website is any indication. Rows upon rows of vacant Treasury Department positions littered the department's homepage. And, as David Gregory pointed out on yesterday's Meet the Press, little has changed over the last month:

"RIP, MBA," Matthew Stewart’s piece on the expensive degree’s impending fall from grace, got TBM readers talking. Barring a few predictable return jabs at the incompetence of journalists, the comments were extremely thoughtful and furthered an interesting debate on the practical and ethical value of going to business school. Check out a few excerpts below and weigh in on whether MBAs made managers evil and fostered irresponsibility on Wall Street.

An angry post on Zero Hedge cites a research report claiming that a whopping 44 percent of Citigroup's holdings are in the category now called "legacy assets," which used to be called toxic assets and which Treasury is hoping the banks would like to clear off their plates. This got us to thinking: What's in the rest of Citi's holdings? We asked a forensic economist to dive deeply into Citi's filings; we think the results are startling.

TBM reader Alex Kelston points out that the message awaiting visitors to the government's Web site, financialstability.gov, is—how do you say?—apt:

"This site is coming soon."

Know hope.

***

One of the latest bailout memes going around is that maybe the government shouldn't have bailed out AIG, because an "AIG bailout" really means a bailout of the counterparties, like Goldman Sachs, who were dumb enough to have AIG insure their transactions. Interestingly, one of the first people to voice this idea was none other than former AIG patriarch Hank Greenberg (whom I wrote about today), who's said that shareholders would have fared better in an AIG bankruptcy than in the federal bailout.

Political and corporate titans looking to get away from it all may have one less retreat to call their own. The lavish Greenbrier Hotel filed for Chapter 11 this morning in Richmond’s bankruptcy court.

From an addendum to Edward Liddy's congressional testimony: "Until the late 1990's, AIG was a well-respected, regulated, and conservative insurance operation."

Proof that it is no longer the late 1990s.

***

TBM Editor James Ledbetter sparked debate among readers when he posted a Sausage entry called "The Stupid Driving Tax That No One Wants." While most agreed that the driving tax plan is flawed, several readers argued that it's too soon to shoot it down.

Reader Hugh Thompson argued that, while we should encourage the use of fuel-efficient vehicles, the gas tax should adjust to shifting levels of fuel consumption:

The AIG drama is a layered affair. There’s the initial outrage between the American people and the company, of course. But there’s also the more personal drama playing out between many of the officials and executives involved. The galling bonus news has strained ties between Treasury Secretary Tim Geithner and AIG CEO Ed Liddy.

The TARP, or Troubled Asset Relief Program: remember that bailout, the very first in an increasingly ugly family of bastard children the new recession left at our doorsteps? The Sunlight Foundation, a nonprofit that “uses the revolutionary power of the Internet to make information about Congress and the federal government more meaningfully accessible to citizens,” has unearthed new details about the program’s birth and entry into the world.