Is FDIC's Sheila Bair Getting Sexist Treatment?

wowOwow:

Even in the new Barack Obama "Yes We Can" era, the boys on Wall Street are apparently still up to their testosterone-fueled tricks.

Rubin protege and Fed Secretary-elect Timothy Geithner is reportedly triangulating with other top financial appointees to get Sheila Bair, the head of the FDIC, to step down.

Bloomberg News is reporting that the new economic team is not comfortable with the independent Bair, who, like Obama, has favored aid for Main Street as well as Wall Street. Her work on the economic crisis and her independence from both the Bush Administration and the Wall Street establishment has been met with high praise from most quarters, including the business press and even top Democratic legislators such as Chris Dodd and Barney Frank. In fact, Barney Frank, the partisan Democrat from Massachusetts, said about the Republican Bair:

Read the whole story: wowOwow

Comments

[sunzen]

10:03 PM on 12/06/2008

Sheila Bair is a hero in this mess...if this is true about Geithner then he should be withdrawn! It proves that these guys cannot be trusted! She is one of the smartest people in the Government on financial matters. Paulson scheduled a speech recently that just happened to coincide with her regular report on the banking industry and bumped her off the Networks....interesting timing Hank! You guys make my stomach churn.

[ema]

01:31 PM on 12/06/2008

Oh, this is ri diculous. It's not because Bair doesn't have a d!ck. It's because she doesn't suck d!ck.

Obama grow some b@lls. Fire Geithner and give Bair his job.

[ErnestineBass]

03:27 PM on 12/06/2008

THANK YOU!!!

[schatsie]

10:56 PM on 12/06/2008

Bingo and bring back Berkeley Born... and other whistleblowers, we do not have the money or time to screw around with these WALL STREET MAFIOSA....

[Jezreel]

06:12 PM on 12/05/2008

Sheila Bair is one Republican that I would like to see in the Obama Administration. She is a pragmatist and she's the only professional in Washington, thus far, who's crafted a realistic strategy for modifying home mortgages and saving homeowners from going into foreclosure. She has not been afraid to challenge the big boys on Wall Street and the Treasury. And she was an early voice in the wilderness crying out for more regulation and warning against the foreclosure crisis. She's really smart and one tough lady. As a woman and a tax payer I really admire her.

Sarah Palin could learn a lot from her if she first acknowledged her stunning lack of intelligence in so many, many areas.

[Henry]

06:33 PM on 12/05/2008

Funny you should say these things. I remember listening to Bair several months ago stating that the FDIC Insurance Fund was not in any threat and that the banks on the problem list posed no threat to the fund. She is a regulator who has been walking in the dark. Her modification plan will cause more pain and agony. The traveling m.o. of her own bank examiners is to take a loss as soon as it is identified. Modifications???? Hardly her domain of business. The FDIC regulates and closes banks...and it's chief wants modifications prevent the workings of the market place to which she is committed??? Can you see a problem with this. The policeman is not the social worker. Don't get me wrong...she may be a wonderful social worker, but Bank Regulator she is not....

[spinns17]

05:41 PM on 12/05/2008

time to put her in charge of the whole mess.

[joebaggadonuts]

05:27 PM on 12/05/2008

Maybe it's because she helped get WaMu into the arms of JP Morgan instead of letting it die and get snapped up by Goldman? Maybe it's because she saved so many homes in the IndyMac disaster and proved that the Paulson method was snake oil.

I think though it's simply that she has independent thinking, not having been stifled by the eastern educational establishment big schools who's economics training has misjudged the world's capital structure so badly as to let us get to the point we are at now. I don't see Krugman or Roubini or anyone else who saw this coming on the economic team yet either. If they get rid of her, I will oppose all further efforts by Obama's team (which I voted for by the way) to effect changes in the economy because then I will know for sure that we are doomed to idiot-group think.

Read Damn, it Feels Good to Be a Banker: And Other Baller Things You Only Get to Say If You Work On Wall Street and you will understand master of the world banker mentality. They are all idiot savants. You like Rain Man ruining our economy? I don't.

[sposton]

06:30 PM on 12/05/2008

Correct! They act so smartly to all of our greatest detriment! They are all geniuses but what really distinguishes them is the possession of the biggest cojones around. The honorable thing to do would have been a massive hara-kiri, but instead, in a typical banksters' fashion, they are proceeding with the disembowelment of the nation.

The financial system as it exists is not salvageable but these geniuses will bankrupt us to prove us wrong. We must understand they are not saving our financial sector; they are saving the private ownership nature of the financial sector - the same people who are directly responsible for this disaster. They want us to conflate these two different concepts so that the banksters can get away with the greatest heist in the history of the world.

[RockySoldier]

05:00 PM on 12/05/2008

every last single time a woman is criticized in a position of power, 'sexism!' is shouted. in the last 4 days, there have been 5 stories asking '...sexist?' the addiction to victimhood in our culture is sickening. it's never that person's own fault- it's always the biases of others that make someone do something, not their own impulses.

[joebaggadonuts]

05:28 PM on 12/05/2008

Oh, thanks. That's original. ;) (not).

[RockySoldier]

08:01 PM on 12/05/2008

hey, 'saved by the bell' and the 90s called- they want their jargon back.

not.

[hotstuff]

05:31 PM on 12/05/2008

Sick of hearing sexist cried, and it isn;t even comeing from the woman!

[Henry]

04:12 PM on 12/05/2008

Her solution to modify troubled loans to get them to some stage where they can "perform" and subsequently share any loss for this subset at 50% is half-baked, ill-founded, and irritates both Paulson and Geithner. What she proposes reaches such a small percentile of the problem (it cannot be used for securitized subprime loans) as to be small time grandstanding for the less informed American public. It sounds Walt Disney wonderful, but when the rubber meets the road everything turns to glue. They do not like her because of her obvious incompetence and lack of real experience. Look at her plan and ask any one of her commissioned bank examiners what he or she thinks of it (the plan) and you'd get a smack-down that would impress Jessie the Bodie Ventura! She must be wonderful in the classroom, but I am afraid that is where she should return(to).

[joebaggadonuts]

05:32 PM on 12/05/2008

Ordinarily obvious incompetence and Bush appointee go hand in hand. In this case you have to prove it since her track record is not the kind of Heck-of-a-job-Brownie job you ordinarily expect.

Read the facts, man. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sheila_C._Bair

I know it's wikipedia, but it squares with my memory of the facts and she seems competent to me. You, the guy with one name are on the carpet to explain yourself, not her. Calling her obviously incompetent is right wingnut radio tactix and neither I nor anyone else I know will buy that crap anymore.

[Henry]

06:26 PM on 12/05/2008

Joe,
The issue of incompetence is the mass modification plan to be administered by others than the FDIC (her narrow domain). Borrowers and bankers can modify loans now. Adding the government to provide special "rates" and then to guaranty what are bad loans makes "fools" out of everyone who has abided by contract. A republican putting the government in as a third party to facilitate is by "definition" incompetent. Or is that schizophrenic?

[sposton]

06:07 PM on 12/05/2008

It is not like the boys like Rubin, Summers, Geithner, Paulson, et al got it right, either. While I don't think they will get rid of her based on her gender, I do believe they will unleash on her their arsenal of weapons of personal destruction, charging her with all kinds of things like incompetence! I don't know, she may indeed be incompetent but I can't think of anyone more culpable for this financial meltdown that Rubin. First he acted as an enabler for banksters in Clinton administration and then benefited by his position at Citigroup while allowing Citigroup to act like a casino. And guess what? Summers and Geithner are Rubin boys. If Bair was associated with such financial eminences like Rubin she would be just fine and her (in)competence wouldn't likely be an issue.

[Henry]

06:20 PM on 12/05/2008

It sounds like you have seen the light. I remember Rubin helping Citi (if memory serves) with Argentian debt problems under the auspices of IMF that was enabled at the Bill level.

[sposton]

03:56 PM on 12/05/2008

Banksters get what banksters want. She will go not because she's a woman but because of what she stands for. A man with similar stance would meet the same end.

[joebaggadonuts]

05:34 PM on 12/05/2008

Bankers getting what they want _is_ the problem. Thanks for hitting the nail on the head, sposton.

If she is forced out we are in for a deeper depression than otherwise, IMHO.

[sposton]

06:09 PM on 12/05/2008

We are heading into a depression no matter what.

[hollybork]

03:25 PM on 12/05/2008

Are they going to do to Bair what they did to Born, the lady lawyer who wanted to force the investment industry to be regulated on their derivative portfolio? They destroyed Born's career and undermined her with the Congress. She was right and the old establishment was wrong Wrong WRONG. Makes a person sick.

[darthdarcy]

03:32 PM on 12/05/2008

That seems to be the program, kick out and isolate any who care about the American people...women especially..!

[joebaggadonuts]

05:34 PM on 12/05/2008

Maybe we can fight back.

[heal57]

02:55 PM on 12/05/2008

Keep Sheila Bair; she's the only one that wanted to help homeowner/borrowers. We need women in the economic part of our government.

[Truth4Voters]

03:31 PM on 12/05/2008

Agreed. Paulson should be ashamed.

[Samalabear]

02:51 PM on 12/05/2008

I believe it's sexist, yes, but the bigger reason is that she's telling it like it is, and she's sticking up for average Americans, and she is not living in a bubble.

[darthdarcy]

02:39 PM on 12/05/2008

Obama should make her Bair the Treasury Secretary and show Goldman Sachs who boss...!

She is a genuine hero, and Geithner proving himself to be a villain and just another swindler scoundrel misogynist same as Hank Paulson and Benny Bernanke..!

[joebaggadonuts]

05:35 PM on 12/05/2008

If we keep complaining loudly enough, perhaps he will change appointments when he is sworn in.

[Pharos]

02:36 PM on 12/05/2008

I trust the title was a rhetorical question, right?