Wisconsinites are headed to the polls to cast their votes in the Wisconsin recall elections. The recall campaigns — against six Republicans today and against two Democratic state senators next week — have gained national attention. They stem from the fierce standoff between the Legislature earlier in the year. The unprecedented circumstances in Wisconsin ensure low voter turnout and noncompetitive results won’t be a problem. Numerous politicians are calling for Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner’s resignation following the downgrade of the U.S. credit rating from AAA to AA+. Congresswoman and presidential …
As Heritage expert J.D. Foster, Ph.D. noted in his January 2011 paper “Congress Has Time and Options on Debt Limit“, Congress had time to discuss how it wants to proceed on the debt limit. Secretary of the Treasury Timothy Geithner’s letter of April 4, 2011 estimates that the Federal Government will not reach the statutory debt limit before May 16, 2011 and that the Treasury can use special measures to extend that date to about July 8, 2011. Thus, it remains clear that Congress has sufficient time to proceed carefully and …
As the Treasury Department reminded us on Wednesday, the federal government will likely reach the debt limit sometime between April 5 and May 31. Hitting the debt ceiling provides a rare moment when Congress and the President are forced to take a stand on a most fundamental and difficult issue: whether the federal government will continue to deficit spend. A central question in the debt limit debate is whether the government would risk defaulting on its outstanding debt. Contrary to disappointing Administration inferences, the answer is that there is no …
On Tuesday, the National Association of Realtors reported that July sales of existing homes fell by 27% from June of this year and by 25.5% compared to July 2009. This annual sales rate of 3.83 million homes was the lowest since NAR began keeping track of sales in 1999. Then yesterday, the Commerce Department reported that July sales of new homes fell 12.4% from June and by 32.4% compared to July 2009. This annual rate of 276,000 new units sold is the lowest since 1963, when government records were first …
Weak economy or not, a huge tax increase is just around the corner. Tax relief enacted nearly a decade ago is set to expire in January, raising taxes for middle-class families, slamming the economy with new burdens, and hurting Americans at every level. The Obama Administration wants to raise taxes especially for high earners. Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner recently defended the Administration’s position by claiming that a failure to raise taxes “would hurt economic recovery by undermining confidence that we are prepared to make a commitment today to bring down …
In the often Orwellian world of government policy pronouncements, the Obama economic team is trying for new ground, with “self-sustaining” recovery, understood at least by the dictionary to mean “maintaining itself by independent effort,” now understood, according to Timothy Geithner and Lawrence Summers, as requiring extensive government support and intervention. In an op-ed published June 23 in The Wall Street Journal, the two most senior Administration economic officials call on their G-20 colleagues to maintain government spending, establish a global framework for financial regulation, and to make efforts in agricultural …
It must not be easy being Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner, these days. His latest task is to sell a skeptical Congress on the Obama Administration’s $90 billion bank tax with something of a convoluted snake oil sales pitch. He tried to make his argument to the Senate Finance Committee on Tuesday. You see, Geithner explained, “Banks should bear the costs for bank failure,” and the tax is really a “too-big-to-fail tax” designed to recoup funds used to bail out banks under the Troubled Asset Relief Program. Unfortunately for Geithner, that …
You probably have seen that new General Motors ad were CEO Ed Whitacre claims his company has repaid their taxpayer bailout “in full, with interest, five years ahead of the original schedule.” Don’t believe it for a second. Nick Gillespie explains why in the video to the right. The New York Times is also calling out the Obama administration for signing off on GM’s Enron-style accounting: But what neither G.M. nor the Treasury disclosed was that the company simply used other funds held by the Treasury to pay off its …
Conservatives say the Dodd Finance Bill means Wall Street Bailouts Forever. Progressives say the Dodd bill “makes bailouts impossible.” Who’s right? Well lets ask Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner who described the bill this way in The Washington Post: The Senate bill gives the government the authority to wind down the firm with no exposure to the taxpayer. No more bailouts. Instead, we will have a bankruptcy-like regime where equityholders will be wiped out and the assets will be sold. “No more bailouts.” Sounds nice. But what does “bankruptcy-like regime” mean?
There is no person more central to Washington’s bailouts of Wall Street than Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner. As President of the Federal Reserve Bank of New York, he oversaw the federal bailout of Bear Stearns and under former Treasury Secretary Hank Paulson, Getihner designed the original bailout plan for the American International Group (AIG). As Treasury Secretary, Geithner has enthusiastically assumed full authority over the $700 billion TARP fund first secured by Paulson under President Bush and he has continued to wield it in the same haphazard manner as his …
