Can't Anyone Here Play This Game?

Conservative policies don't work in a crisis. They work for robbery. Therefore, it shouldn't surprise anyone that the Treasury Department has been flailing from side to side in response to the financial meltdown.

The head of a new Congressional panel set up to monitor the gigantic federal bailout says the government still does not seem to have a coherent strategy for easing the financial crisis, despite the billions it has already spent in that effort.

Elizabeth Warren, the chairwoman of the oversight panel, said in an interview Monday that the government instead seemed to be lurching from one tactic to the next without clarifying how each step fits into an overall plan.

“You can’t just say, ‘Credit isn’t moving through the system,’ ” she said in her first public comments since being named to the panel. “You have to ask why.”

If the answer is that banks do not have money to lend, it would make sense to push capital into their hands, as the Treasury has been doing over the last two months, she continued. But if the answer is that their potential borrowers are getting less creditworthy with each passing day, “pouring money into banks isn’t going to fix that problem,” she said.

The GAO is similarly puzzled by the grand design here, releasing a report yesterday with a number of disturbing conclusions that TPM Muckraker recounted, including:

• Banks don't have to tell Treasury how they're spending the bailout money
• There's no monitoring of conflicts of interest between Treasury and the recipients of bailout money
• Treasury wants to let banks enforce executive pay limits themselves

And on top of all this, Emperor Paulson might ask for the second $350 billion from the Congress before the new Administration comes in, in an effort to steal manage the problem even more.

There's no way Paulson should be allowed another dime, given past performance.