Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner and Fed Chairman Ben Bernanke are testifying before the House Financial Services committee as you read this. We’ll be following today’s hearing pretty closely, both because we (ahem) value your readership, but also because the hearing’s shaping up to be much more interesting than originally anticipated.
Two big stories broke yesterday, both of which Josh wrote about over at the mother ship. Suddenly there’s much more at stake than the question of when Geithner knew about the AIG bonuses. There’s now also the questions of the extent to which the administration has handed over the shaping of bailout possibility to the bad financial actors themselves, and of the possibility that the administration will seek extraordinary power going forward to seize distressed non-bank financial institutions like hedge funds and investment firms. That could have huge ramifications for the government’s power over regular banks, which often own such institutions, and, depending on the scope of the legislation, for much smaller institutions as well.
Stay tuned.
