Mr. Geitner is Crowned, and the Regicide is On

After a good lunch, I have it all figured out - Mr. Geitner is the fall guy. Not the scapegoat, note well, but the fall guy - the deception, the red herring. This is a grand, high drama, shell game...and everyone is about to fall for it. Geitner gets fired, everyone is satisfied that somebody got punished, move on to something else, and the fix is in. A trillion doled out, maybe more.

What is the NUB of all this? A clue: systemic dysfunction of Wall Street - insufficient regulation, excessive compensation of executives, personal hubris.

But Wall Street's illness can be catching...or, better, persuasive. As E. Robinson writes in TruthDig (Mar 19, '09)

"...[what] Geithner doesn’t seem to understand, though, is how and why appearances matter. There has been a steady flow of news indicating that Wall Street doesn’t realize that the Era of Excess is over,..."

BTW, are the new regulatory policies drafted yet? Hope they haven't been forgotten in all the chills and thrills of the AIG-bonus thing.