The WSJ reports that the administration is retiring TP's favorite acronym of the day, TARP, since it will be renaming the Troubled Asset Relief Program as the Financial Stability Plan.
What a terrible idea. How are we going to pull ourselves up by our bootstraps if we can't come up with a better acronym than FSP? It sounds like a medical condition newly coined by a drug company in order to sell a newly invented medication in search of a disease, but that's a different rant for another day. Let's focus on the immediate, more pressing national problem of patching together a replacement for the ripped TARP.
If you upgrade your TARP, do you move up to a TENT (Traumatic Excesses Necessitating Taxes)? A larger upgrade would take us to HUT (Horrendous Uber-Taxation), YURT (Yesterday's Ugliness Rebounds Today), or even SHACK (Safe Haven After Capitalist Killings).
Then comes news that Timothy Geithner, our savior from Henry Paulson, is just a younger Henry Paulson clone. The new sheriff in town, hand-picked by the most forward-thinking president in two generations to change the way business is done in Washington, doesn't want to tie the hands of the geniuses in the banking industry with too much oversight or transparency:
In the end, "the plan largely repeats the Bush administration's approach of deferring to many of the same companies and executives who had peddled risky loans and investments at the heart of the crisis," declares the NYT.
It seems that so-called liberals and conservatives in the lofty reaches of policy making have much in common; either they are so beholden to the very people and institutions they are asked to regulate that they dare not actually regulate, or they have no idea what to do other than what they have always been told to do, which is what got us here. Don't tie the hands of the banks by requiring them to disclose what they are doing. Don't limit their compensation or they won't be able to attract other geniuses just like themselves.
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