collusion: they has it

That $191,300 Timothy Geithner will receive in salary as U.S. Treasury Secretary is actually a pay cut for the ex-NY Fedhead, who stands to gain $434,666 in severance from the Federal Reserve (with an extra $63,111 in Fed pension benefits that he will take via a one-time lump sum payoff).

Financial Week reports on Geithner's additional financial conflicts of interest:

Mr. Geithner’s largest asset is partial ownership of a Cape Cod vacation property in Massachusetts, valued between $250,001 and $500,000. Most of his other assets are mutual fund holdings valued between $15,001 and $100,000.

The disclosure forms value assets in broad ranges.

Mr. Geithner, who has spent his entire career working for governmental agencies and the International Monetary Fund, said in a letter to Treasury lawyers that he agreed to divest a number of these holdings before he took the job.

These divestments were worth between $211,000 and $515,000 on the form, which is dated January 12. They include holdings in the Transamerica PIMCO Total Return Fund, the Vanguard Short-Term Federal Fund, several college savings plans and other U.S. government securities funds.

As Treasury Secretary, he has direct influence over the issuance and markets for Treasury securities and on tax advantages for investments such as college savings accounts.

Paulson was forced to sell some 3.2 million shares of Goldman stock before he took office in July 2006. At that time, they were worth about $480 million and the proceeds were deposited into a blind trust.

I am baffled as to why Geithner is so confused as to the value of his assets, pricing them somewhere between $740,000 and $1.7 million - maybe he tried to use TurboTax's "mark-to-market" function to calculate current market value?

Compared to Hank Paulson, Geithner's holdings look like chump change - but that should not be mistaken for a sign that Geithner checks out where personal interests are concerned; alternate conflicts of interest could easily lurk just outside of his portfolio.

from Portfolio.com - the true axis of evil

As SmartMoney points out, it isn't the size (of the portfolio) that matters, but with whom the Treasury Secretary is entangled:

In an age of bailouts, Geithner is the original Bailout Czar. It was Geithner, after all, who was the instrumental figure in arranging JP Morgan’s (JPM: 27.66, +2.60, +10.37%) takeover of Bear Stearns, a deal in which $29 billion of taxpayer money was pledged as a backstop against illiquid and toxic assets.

It wasn’t Hank Paulson, but rather Tim Geithner who put together the plan to have the government rescue AIG, to the tune of $85 billion and growing.

It has been widely noted Geithner was in favor of stepping in with taxpayer dollars to save Lehman Brothers. I guess it’s pretty easy to spend taxpayer dollars when you aren’t even paying your own taxes.

If you are unfamiliar with Geithner, simply go the Federal Reserve’s web site to see a line-item balance sheet of his work: billions of tax dollars for AIG, Bear Stearns (look for “Maiden Lane LLC”; it’s the corporation created for Bear Stearns’s liquidation), commercial money markets and loans to primary dealers.

Can such a mastermind be trusted to fondle Obama's bloated stimulus cash? Well no. But what choice do we have? All we can do is keep an eye on the little prick to make sure he isn't running back to Robert Rubin or any number of his corporate cronies with our loot.