DailyDirt: Handwriting Analysis For Secretaries Of The US Treasury

from the urls-we-dig-up dept

Everyone is supposed to have a unique signature for signing all kinds of important documents. Your signature represents how you would like to be viewed by the world, according to some signature-analysis theories. For most people, a signature isn't worth much and doesn't get much attention, but celebrities and public officials get a bit more scrutiny. Here are some signature examples that have been immortalized (or will soon be) on US currency.

• Jack Lew's distinctive signature has been described as a stretched-out Slinky -- which would look awesome unbecoming AWESOME on a dollar bill. A ton of FOIA requests are probably being filed now to see all the documents that have Lew's signature on them.... [url]
• Here's a list of 47 signatures that have graced US currency since 1928. Anna Escobedo Cabral wins for the most legibly stylish. [url]
• Timothy Geithner also had a unintelligible signature, but he changed it to make it more readable for the US Treasury. From now on, I'm sure some people will refer to Geithner as the former Treasury Secretary known as [insert sig here]. [url]

If you'd like to read more awesome and interesting stuff, check out this unrelated (but not entirely random!) Techdirt post.

Filed Under: anna escobedo cabral, autograph, currency, handwriting, jack lew, signature, timothy geithner

Rep. Peter King Wants Treasury Dept. To Put Wikileaks On Terrorist List

from the overreact-much? dept

Apparently Rep. Peter King is in a competition with Senator Joe Lieberman to see who can overreact more to Wikileaks. It seems like a neck-and-neck competition, with Peter King's brand of craziness potentially taking the lead. King, of course, was the guy who insisted that Wikileaks should be declared a terrorist organization and claimed (with nothing whatsoever to back this up) that the cable leak was worse than a military attack. His latest move is to ask Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner to add Wikileaks to the Treasury Department's "Specially Designated National and Blocked Persons List," which is usually used to designate terrorist and organized crime operations.

So while Lieberman merely used political pressure to get companies to block or censor Wikileaks, King wants it to become official government policy that no US companies or individuals should be doing anything with Wikileaks. Overreact much?

Filed Under: peter king, terrorist list, timothy geithner, treasury department, wikileaks
Companies: wikileaks

Treasury Department Meddling In Venture Capital For No Good Reason

from the not-all-private-equity-is-the-same dept

The Wall Street Journal has an important editorial pointing out why it's a mistake for Treasury Secretary Timothy Geither to include venture capital funds in his new regulatory plan to deal with "systemic risk." There's no doubt that highly leveraged hedge funds contributed greatly to the current economic situation creating a level of systemic risk that we're only just coming to terms with. However, it's not at all clear what venture capital has to do with that. Yes, both are unregulated funds of private equity, but that's about where the similarities end. Venture capital relies very little on debt, and is usually a way for wealthy investors to bet money more long term on new innovations, rather than the sort of short-term speculation that is more common with hedge funds.

Yet, for some reason, they're being lumped together and will have the same regulatory burdens. This could significantly hinder venture capitalists, similar to some other recent regulatory changes, creating unnecessary and wasteful burdens that are more for show than any actual effort to protect the economy. As the editorial points out: we've already stress tested the venture capital world, when the dot com bubble burst, it didn't cause any systemic risk. No banks failed because of the bubble bursting. So why is the government suddenly acting like VCs are a threat to the widespread economy now?

Filed Under: economy, systemic risk, timothy geithner, treasury, venture capital

Making The Tough Choices To Save The Economy?

from the stop-giving-the-banks-everything-they-want dept

With the latest plan laid out last week on how to "save Wall Street" ("the Geithner plan"), there's a lot of back and forth over whether or not this is a good plan or not -- and while Planet Money had a decent "is it good or bad?" show, the folks there didn't get too deep into it (and even claimed that no one really thought the plan was all that dangerous (just that it could slow down the recovery). However, the more I read up on it, the worse and worse it seems. Simon Johnson has a long, but worthwhile writeup at The Atlantic, where he delves into how Wall Street has effectively taken over Washington DC, such that it helped both create the mess, and then set things up so that the "recovery plan" only benefits those who caused the problems in the first place. This echoes a piece by Andy Kessler last week, where he pointed out that we're effectively handing money to those who brought the collapse upon us -- and suggests that the better response is to simply stymie the plans of the hedge funds -- flooding the markets where they're looking to buy, rather than subsidizing them.

Then, there's Umair Haque, who basically makes the same points, but suggests that this is an outright looting of taxpayer money by putting most of the risk on taxpayers, and encouraging the hedge funds to make increasingly risky loans (you know, like the ones that got us into this mess in the first place). The root of all of these stories is that the government seems to think that the only way to fix the problem is to reinflate the bubble, rather than letting the bubble deflate and moving forward from there. The problem with reinflating the bubble isn't just that it puts off the inevitable (though, it does), but that the inevitable is that much worse when it comes.

It's what we've done for the past couple decades -- effectively building an even shakier house of cards, and every time the cards start to fall... we just reinforce it with another layer of shaky cards to prop it up. At some point, the cards do have to fall, and propping it up with more leverage isn't going to help that.

Even if, as Richard Posner suggests, the current plan is about the most politically feasible, it's still problematic. The politics of the situation is troubling. On one side, you have populist anger, making it difficult to do certain necessary things. On the other, you do still have the influence of the bankers, who view the world as being one where we need to keep propping up that house of cards.

Why is it that no one is talking about carefully taking down the house of cards while building a sturdy house next door?

Filed Under: bailout, financial crisis, politics, timothy geithner, wall street