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House Republicans said on Thursday that Treasury Secretary Timothy F. Geithner presented the House speaker, John A. Boehner, a detailed proposal to avert the year-end fiscal crisis with $1.6 trillion in tax increases over 10 years, an immediate new round of stimulus spending, home mortgage refinancing and a permanent end to Congressional control over statutory borrowing limits. The proposal, loaded with Democratic priorities and short on detailed spending cuts, was likely to meet strong Republican resistance. In exchange for locking in the $1.6 trillion in added revenues, President Obama embraced $400 billion in savings from Medicare and other entitlements, to...

President Obama’s spokesman said he was “surprised” that Republicans laughed at a proposal from Treasury Secretary Tim Geithner that would raise taxes by $1.6 trillion, increase spending, and give the president unilateral control over the debt ceiling. “I was surprised they [the Republicans] were surprised,” White House Deputy Press Secretary Josh Earnest told reporters today during the press gaggle when asked about the proposal Geithner made in a meeting with Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell, R-Ky. “There is no reason for anybody to be surprised.” Geithner foreshadowed this proposal with comments made to Bloomberg TV last week. “It would have...

Mitch McConnell, the Senate Republican leader, says he “burst into laughter” Thursday when Treasury Secretary Tim Geithner outlined the administration proposal for averting the fiscal cliff. He wasn’t trying to embarrass Geithner, McConnell says, only responding candidly to his one-sided plan, explicit on tax increases, vague on spending cuts. Geithner’s visit to his office left McConnell discouraged about reaching a “balanced” deal on tax hikes and spending reductions designed to prevent a shock to the economy in January. “Nothing good is happening” in the negotiations, McConnell says, because of Obama’s insistence on tax rate hikes for the wealthy but unwillingness...

About Us Resources Send Tips Donate RSS CNSNews.TV On the Spot On the Scene The Schein OTJ Golden Hookah Home » News Treasury Secretary Geithner: Lift Debt Limit to Infinity By Elizabeth Harrington November 19, 2012 Subscribe to Elizabeth Harrington's posts (CNSNews.com) - Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner said Friday that Congress should stop placing legal limits on the amount of money the government can borrow and effectively lift the debt limit to infinity. On Bloomberg TV, “Political Capital” host Al Hunt asked Geithner if he believes “we ought to just eliminate the debt ceiling.” “Oh, absolutely,” Geithner said. “You do?...

WASHINGTON (CNNMoney) -- Even with the same president, the United States will have a new Treasury Secretary. Tim Geithner, the last holdover from President Obama's original economic team, has indicated he's ready to leave after four tumultuous years. With Obama's victory, Geithner is expected to resign soon, but Treasury officials are mum on the details.

You have to give Treasury Secretary Tim Geithner some credit for spin: today the Treasury announced “Further Steps to Expedite Wind Down of Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac.” The only problem is that the steps announced largely put the taxpayer at greater risk in order to protect holders of Fannie and Freddie debt. Essentially, the Treasury has amended its agreements with Fannie and Freddie so that the companies no longer have to pay a fixed dividend to the U.S. taxpayer, but instead “every dollar of profit” from the companies to the taxpayer. The problem is that the Government Sponsored Enterprises...

Matthew Boyle of the Daily Caller reports that internal emails show Treasury Secretary Tim Geithner was “the driving force” behind terminating the pensions of 20,000 non-union retirees from the Delphi auto parts manufacturing company, as part of the government’s bailout plan for General Motors.  Union workers, on the other hand, “saw their pensions topped off and made whole.” This decision was supposed to be made by the independent Pension Benefit Guaranty Corporation, which is meant to be free of political influence, so it can represent the interests of private-sector pensioners.Instead, the Daily Caller unearthed a string of emails that show...

(CNSNews.com) - President Barack Obama, who is moving ahead with a regulation that forces observant American Catholics to act against their consciences and the teachings of their faith, will be one of the keynote speakers at an Oct. 18 white-tie fundraiser hosted by Cardinal Timothy Dolan, the archbishop of New York and president of the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops. The fundraiser—the annual Alfred E. Smith Memorial Foundation Dinner--will benefit the foundation, which Cardinal Dolan serves as board president. The foundation's website says it provides funding “for healthcare causes.” Al Smith, a three-term governor of New York, became the first...

A new video advertisement from conservative advocacy group Let Freedom Ring features the stories of several Delphi salaried retirees, who lost their pensions at the hand of the Secretary Tim Geithner’s Department of Treasury. “I would ask President Obama why I had no rights and he had all the rights to take my pension away and never ever look back and say not only did I take it from Mary Miller, but I took it from 20,000 other people and their families,” one Delphi salaried retiree, Mary Miller, says in the ad. “It’s made life pretty rough. I’ve really struggled...

Emails obtained by The Daily Caller show that the U.S. Treasury Department, led by Timothy Geithner, was the driving force behind terminating the pensions of 20,000 salaried retirees at the Delphi auto parts manufacturing company. The move, made in 2009 while the Obama administration implemented its auto bailout plan, appears to have been made solely because those retirees were not members of labor unions. The internal government emails contradict sworn testimony, in federal court and before Congress, given by several Obama administration figures. They also indicate that the administration misled lawmakers and the courts about the sequence of events surrounding...

Geithner meets with Murray amid growing anxiety over fiscal cliffBy Alexander Bolton - 08/02/12 07:44 PM ET Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner met with Sen. Patty Murray Thursday amid increased fears in Washington that Congress might decide not to act to prevent the nation from going over the so-called fiscal cliff. Murray, (Wash.), the Democratic co-chair of the 2011 deficit supercommittee, recently said that Democrats would allow all of the Bush tax rates to expire and then seek to renew lower rates for the middle class, unless Republicans agree to raise taxes on the nation’s highest income earners. As Treasury secretary...

When Tim Geithner became Treasury Secretary he was appointed even though he had skipped on taxes and paid $42,702 to make up his omission. He pretended at the time that this failure to pay taxes owed for a number of years had simply been an oversight. Anyone really paying attention at the time, and applying reasonable judgment, was astonished. The Former head of the New York Fed was being placed into the control seat of the Nation’s Treasury. Not a single taxpayer in the Nation who trudges through the annual process of filing income taxes believed Geithner’s excuses on this egregious wrong...

The Government Accounting Office (GAO) released a report entitled “TROUBLED ASSET RELIEF PROGRAM: Further Actions Needed to Enhance Assessments and Transparency of Housing Programs.” The report is not a flattering portrayal of their efforts to provide transparency for TARP. I testified in the House of Representatives in 2008 on transparency for the $700 billion TARP saying that “Greater transparency about use of the TARP money can alleviate concerns among U.S. taxpayers and the investment community that the funds are being used appropriately and not being wasted.” Apparently, Secretary Geithner didn’t agree with my testimony. So, what did the GAO conclude...

Treasury Secretary Tim Geithner gets very angry at the suggestion that he conduct the bank bailouts in a transparent manner, according to Neil Barofsky, the former special inspector general for the Treasury Department. “Neil, I have been the most f–king transparent secretary of the Treasury in this country’s entire f–king history!” Geithner shouted at Barofsky in 2009, the former inspector general writes in his new book Bailout: An Inside Account of How Washington Abandoned Main Street While Rescuing Wall Street. Geithner’s anger stemmed from Barofsky saying, “Mr. Secretary,

WASHINGTON (AP) — Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner said Wednesday that he acted quickly and appropriately to deal with problems in a key global interest rate once he realized the rate-setting process was flawed. Geithner, who was then head of the Federal Reserve Bank of New York, said during an interview with CNBC that he sent a memo in 2008 to British banking authorities outlining his concerns about possible manipulation of the London interbank offered rate (Libor). He also said he alerted U.S. regulators.

(snip) The LIBOR scandal is "so big I don't think people have got their minds around it," says Jim Rickards, a partner at JAC Capital Advisors and author of Currency Wars: The Making of the Next Global. "This is the largest financial scandal I've seen in my career." If $500 trillion of swaps are based on LIBOR and the rate was manipulated by 10 basis points over five years, that's $2.5 trillion of fraudulent transactions -- more than the combined capital of the nation's five largest banks, Rickards explains. "Congress may have to step in to limit the damages because...

The latest development in the Libor-manipulation scandal is that the banks weren’t really fixing the price of the key interest rate in total secret — US regulators were aware of the sleazy activities at the time, and seemed to have done nothing. Which should surprise no one. I can’t tell you how much federal officials knew about the activities of Barclay’s, JPMorgan, Citigroup and the other big banks at the center of the maelstrom. In coming weeks, both Federal Reserve chief Ben Bernanke and Treasury Secretary Tim Geithner will inevitably discuss the mess when they appear before Congress. Bernanke testifies...

Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner is pleading with Europe to repeat the American banking experiment called TARP – Troubled Asset Relief Program. Europe already has programs in place such as LTRO. Geithner wants a huge infusion of cash into Euro banks (such as in faltering Spanish banks). Will it work? It will discourage further bank failures, but it doesn’t solve the underlying problem – government spent too much, borrowed too much and promised too many entitlements. Eurozone growth is feeble and simply giving banks more money may instill confidence in the banking system, but it does not necessarily help with more...

Tim Geithner outdoes himself this evening with three hypocritical, self-defecating-deceiving, and typically ignominious clips courtesy of his interview with Jeffrey Brown of PBS NewsHour. While we knew TurboTax was beyond him, the Treasury debacle-in-chief admits he doesn't understand how the debt limit has bubbled back up (seeing it as part of a partisan political agenda); admits that perhaps the NY Fed has a 'perception problem' with Jamie Dimon on the board; and his piece-de-resistance his cognitive dissonance erupts as he touts Obama's economic and jobs record: "look how well we are doing relative to any other major country". It seems...

Recently, Barack Obama has refrained from mentioning Dodd-Frank as one of his big accomplishments as President. That's fortunate, because had Obama used that as a campaign claim this month, the huge loss taken by JP Morgan and one-time Obama ally Jamie Dimon would have done serious damage. As it is, Politico wonders whether Obama might have a big problem convincing voters that he's done anything significant to address the underlying issues that created the 2008 financial-system collapse: The giant $2 billion trading loss at JPMorgan Chase highlights a central problem in President Barack ObamaÂ’s case for a second term: Four...