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Obama hasn't even been sworn in yet, and already the Wall Street cheerleaders are celebrating his first great triumph. According the pundits, the stock market staged a surprise 494 point rally on Friday because--get this--it was announced that Timothy Geithner would be appointed Obama's Treasury Secretary.
Timothy who?
What nonsense. The sudden turn-around in stocks had a lot more to do with short-covering than anything else, but don't let that get in the way of a good story. Even so, the last minute surge on the NYSE couldn't stop another week-long bloodbath that ended with the Dow and S&P 500 tumbling another 5 percent. That's not to say that Geithner is not bright and talented guy. He is; and so is his White House counterpart, Lawrence Summers. But the media hype is way overdone. Geithner doesn't drive the markets and he isn't "change you can believe in". In fact, he's a protege of Henry Kissinger, a member of the Council on Foreign Relations, and has the same political pedigree as his predecessor, Henry Paulson. They're both part of the ruling fraternity and their views of the world are nearly identical. There's no doubt that Geithner will be more competent and effective than Paulson but, then again, who wouldn't be? Paulson may be the biggest flop at Treasury since Andrew Mellon steered the country onto the reef during the Great Depression.
