Larry Summers Is Full Of It

American Scofflaw
Treasury Secretary Henry Paulson blew it, Ben Bernancke blew it and now it looks like Lawrence Summers and David Axelrod, Obama's top economic advisers, are about to blow it big time. The horse is long since dead but the flogging continues.

“The focus isn’t going to be on the needs of banks; it’s going to be on the needs of the economy for credit,” Lawrence Summers on Face the nation, 19th January. In the same segment, both he and David Axelrod agree that Paulson's use of the first $350 Billion of the TARP money was a failure..

"The point is to get credit flowing again to businesses and families across the country -- that hasn’t happened with the expenditure of the first $350 billion"

The proposal ? Set up an "aggregator" or " Bad" bank in to which Wall St. can pour it's toxic waste or keep it on their balance sheets while being guaranteed by the taxpayer. Looks like the focus is going to be on the banks after all. The fact that the banks would be unloading more than a trillion dollars in worthless junk, paid for by the taxpayer, does not seem to Summers and Axelrod as a particularly bad idea.