Treasury Struggling To Hire Enough Staff To Handle $700B Rescue Plan

Wall Street Journal:

WASHINGTON - President-elect Barack Obama has made his most important Treasury Department personnel choice, but Timothy Geithner has big personnel challenges of his own.

The current Treasury has so far struggled to keep up with the task of hiring enough people to handle the $700 billion financial rescue package passed by Congress in October. The man now in charge of running the Troubled Asset Relief Program, Assistant Secretary Neel Kashkari, said the department's Office of Financial Stability, with about 40 full-time employees, is operating at half-staff.

Read the whole story: Wall Street Journal

Comments

[gretchenart]

hopefully they don't need $700B in staff to administer the same in dough

[Bitsko]

There's scads of laid-off and fired MBA's ready to work in my NYC neighborhood.

[Tom95134]

You really have to ask just how many people are willing to join the government under the Bush administration and have their resume forever painted with that brush?

[lisakaz2]

Or how many "pass" their neo litmus test (as per the Iraq Provisional Authority).

[dandypuddin]

I'm available. Can't say I'm great with numbers, but then again seems not many of the banks are either.

[danusgram]

gee minnesota has a lot of unemployed with skills and education locate the jobs there

[TommyMcCarthy]

Hey!....Th­ere's hope after all.......­..there's bound to be at leat a FEW entry-level positions to help shovel all that money out the door to the corporations!
tm

[simplify]

Boycott he news media. All we get is negativity.
Is this story all the headline leads us to believe?..­..why is the news media always negative?.
I think people have to seriously think about the effect it has on society as a whole.

[munki]

YES... how about give case studies to reputed business schools...
Harvard, Boston U, Wharton, CAL, Stanford..­. or get inters... as part of their school dissertati­ons...

[Pearlman]

I say we spend more money educating the public on how to read a simple credit card or mortgage contract. So many are now claiming manipulation of their ignorance of money matters. No wonder so few have money to carry around. How can they control what they don't understand­... just live day to day till the money is gone and gripe for more.

[wadenelson1]

What good does reading it do?

Either you accept their terms and sign or else you live without credit cards. There's no negotiation.

The terms are intentionally made vague and misleading by high priced lawyers. Should I hire one too, to decode it for me?

Usury laws in this country have become a distant memory. They existed for a reason. The greed of MBNA and others issuing cards will lead to their downfall; they killed the golden goose that was credit cards with reasonable limits and fair interest rates.

I, for one, won't shed a tear.

[WilliePilgrim]

Score another win for the beaurocracy. No matter how the feds screw up, the solution always involves an expansion of a federal beaurocracy whose ineptness can be compensated only by hiring more people. Really, while major layoffs are reported around the country and in particular the financial services market,, the federal beaurocracy is "strugglin­g"...to do what? Cut its costs...No­, to hire more "qualified" employees. If Obama is going to make headway in bringing the government into alignment with reality, let's hope he can figure out a way that we benefit from a smaller and more effective government to be at least a part of the equation.

[BeyondKen]

Untrue. President Clinton _reduced_ the federal bureaucracy.

PS, Willie, get Firefox. It has a built-in spell-checker.

[instagladiator]

Oh great! However, there is more - much, much more.

http://www.trosch.org/law/fed-paper-money.html

Excellent reading. The Money Managers have been in total control for far too long. Paulson does not represent the country or the taxpayers. He merely represents his private company (FRS) with one purpose, to collect interests on monies loaned - to make a profit.

It doesn't take a rocket scientist to figure this out and it is no conspiracy theory - it's factual!!

[darthdarcy]

Hire me I help blow a few hundred billion just pay me by volume of dollars distribute­d...like Wall St. investment banks...

I can do it for only .01% of gross volume..

[concernvoter]

What the HECK!! Cancel the darn plan, because we are still being robbed by bailouts.

[datone]

There are plenty of qualified bankers, some of them retired like myself who at age 66 still have some miles left on the old tires. Look on the west coast.

[cabgx2]

I agree with you. The government needs to look at our aenior community. I hope you are able to help.

[Georgia1992]

datone, go for it! If you don't, they'll only bring in the recent college graduates who only have the book knowledge and not the experience. Us middle-aged people still have much going for us. Too bad the last 8 years of the current administration and corporate-America didn't see that. Send that resume!

[nogimmicks]

One criminal stupidity leads to another. Hire 40 new researchers to find a cure for cancer instead. And give them 700 billion dollars (by the way the entire annual budget spent on cancer research, drug discovery and development is ~5 billion dollars). Giving the taxpayer money to 30M-dollar­/y-salarie­d CEOs to keep feeding the expensive and wasteful parasitic financial sector is insane.

[CaptainVideo]

Finding a cure for cancer would be great, but it is not going to keep the financial crisis from dragging the economy into a depression. Very smart economic policy is needed to prevent that.
A properly functioning financial system is absolutely essential to a properly functioning economy and the reason that the economy is now going into a deep recession is that the malfunctioning financial system has been strangling the economy. This needs to be corrected if things are not going to get much worse. One of the things that is needed is that the rescue packages be much better designed than they have been under Paulson.

Obama is a lot smarter than you and understands that.

[geobushono]

Well then, praise the repugs....­........it­'s their plan.
OH wait, THAT makes it a bad plan......­..........­.

I can't imagine a better President than Obama. But he's not President yet.
So let's just sit back and watch the bankers take another bite at the apple.

If (this) was a good plan, there would be NO problem finding Staff to sign up.

[dandypuddin]

Well, I seem to remember reading something somewhere about some people being out of work and needing a job.

[firstandlast]

"The budget should be balanced, the Treasury should be refilled, public debt should be reduced, the arrogance of officialdom should be tempered and controlled, and the assistance to foreign lands should be curtailed lest Rome become bankrupt. People must again learn to work, instead of living on public assistance­."

Cicero - 55 BC
(Surprised?)
So what have Liberals learned in 2 millennia?
Apparently ..... NOTHING!

[CaptainVideo]

It is exactly this kind of conventional economic wisdom that made it impossible for the Hoover administration to deal with the Great Depression. When the economy is going into a recession and risks going into a depression those nostrums will make things worse. It is like prescribing medicine to reduce blood pressure to a person who is suffering from low blood pressure.

We have learned a thing or too about macroeconomics since 55BC, and fortunately Obama's economic advisors know that.

[Seamus]

So what have Liberals learned in 2 millennia?

And "Liberals" are responsible for the past eight years of fiscal and humane irresponsibility? Look in the mirror, firstandlast. All of us are responsible for this debacle. I don't know how your Members of Congress voted but mine voted for this mess - and I'm not voting for any of them again.

[wadenelson1]

I won't deny that liberals have supported many expensive programs.

but who's been steering the ship the last 8 years?

what party held a majority in Congress until recently.

Was it not the Republican Conservatives?

And while continuously blaming "tax and spend" liberals for our nation's ills have they not consistently "borrowed and spent?"

Financing an entire war on borrowed money among other things?

Financing $700B bailout (SO FAR) on borrowed money?

The only difference seems to be the Republicans prefer to 'bail out" rich individuals and corporations rather than the neediest members of our society. No?