Follow this link to the Huffington Post article on the report.

I posted my initial reaction before I have had a chance to read the report.  Follow this link to see my first response.

This response was in two pieces which I quote below.

(Geithner’s team ended up paying top dollar for toxic assets — “an amount far above their market value at the time,” the report notes.)

If anyone has a memory long enough to reach back before the Obama administration, they might remember the great conundrum of the time. If we paid the then market value for the securities, the whole financial system would collapse. That was the exact problem at the time – the securities had a market value that had fallen to far less than their initial price.

So we could have got a tremendous bargain and entered into a decades long depression or we could have paid more than they were worth, staved off a collapse, and be criticized for it at the time and in the future.

I’ll wait for cooler heads to judge what happened before I decide what reward Geithner deserves. There is no worry after all, we know that no good deed goes unpunished.

Let me see if I can put this another way.

You don’t need an entity with huge, deep pockets to step in and solve a free market problem by paying free market prices. The free market was quite capable of doing that.

The whole point of the intervention was to do what the free market could not do. That is to pump in money that made no sense for any single free market player, but made a whole lot of sense for the only entity that could protect the whole system from collapse.

That is Keynes’ great insight to what happens during a depression.

I posted a response to another comment that lamented that Wall Street did not learn its lesson because of Geithner’s intervention.

You are right. Wall Street will never learn if they don’t pay the price. The paradox was that if Wall Street got an object lesson, the rest of us would have paid a great price in enduring a financial collapse and decades of depression.

If we staved off a collapse and a depression, Wall Street would not get its object lesson.

Which of these two choices would you have picked?

Apparently, now everyone would have chosen the path of collapse.

My ability to continue to feed myself is the result of not choosing the path of collapse. Nobody else may, but I appreciate the choice that was made. We need to find other ways to give Wall Street the lesson it deserves.

After breakfast, I will try to read the actual report to see if it matches the HuffPo headline and story.

I still haven’t read the entire report, but I did find the following on page 15:

In the final analysis, the Federal Reserve and Treasury believed that the risks of not rescuing AIG outweighed the risks associated with rescuing the troubled insurance company, and on September 16, 2008, the Federal Reserve Board authorized an $85 billion credit facility for AIG.