Secretary Geithner can keep repeating his assertion he has worked in public service his whole life… How does he define working in the public service?

Geithner’s last job, as the President of the New York Fed highlights that question.

The New York Fed is not government-owned. Most people fail to recognize this fact. Simply, the Federal Reserve Board (responsible for monetary policy, with a dual mandate of full employment and price stability) is an independent part of the federal government, while the New York Fed is a shareholder-owned or private corporation...

Historically, the New York Fed has been among the most profitable shareholder-owned corporations in the world. Yet it keeps the details of its shareholders’ ownership information private. What we do know is that its owners include precisely those institutions it is tasked to regulate and supervise and those is has obviously failed to adequately supervise. Unlike the other District Banks of the Federal Reserve system, which have overseen their banks quite well, the New York Fed’s concentration of the largest banks, coupled with its unique role of managing the market operations of the entire Fed system, has built a culture where it sees itself as a market participant and peer to those firms it regulates.

via Has the New York Fed been serving the public trust? Has Geithner? » New Deal 2.0.

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You read that headline correctly. Unfortunately, the Obama Administration is financing oil exploration off Brazil. The U.S. is going to lend billions of dollars to Brazil’s state-owned oil company, Petrobras, to finance exploration of the huge offshore discovery in Brazil’s Tupi oil field in the Santos Basin near Rio de Janeiro. Brazil’s planning minister confirmed that White House National Security Adviser James Jones met this month with Brazilian officials to talk about the loan. The U.S. Export-Import Bank tells us it has issued a “preliminary commitment” letter to Petrobras in the amount of $2 billion and has discussed with Brazil the possibility of increasing that amount. …this corporate foreign aid may strike some readers as odd, given that the U.S. Treasury seems desperate for cash and Petrobras is one of the largest corporations in the Americas.  via President Obama Finances Offshore Drilling in Brazil – WSJ.com.

And so it goes here in the United States of America during its fin de siecle, where NIMBY knows no bounds, where we will no longer build factories here but will contract to build them in China, and we will no longer drill for oil, but will contract with third-world states to do the drilling for us instead.

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