Some recent links on how Obama dealt (or did not deal) with Wall Street.
Favored Obama appointees seem to share certain qualities: They work within the system, they don't like to ruffle feathers or pick fights, and they keep their profiles low. They are technocrats.
The Justice Department has successfully convicted dozens of bankers for insider trading. But the big banks did something much worse and got away with it.
But what many of us want to know is: why, immediately after the most severe financial crisis in more than seventy years, which resulted in the loss of almost nine million jobs, did the Justice Department choose to train its heavy artillery on insider traders? Sure, insider trading is bad. It's very rich people cheating to make themselves extravagantly rich. It should be illegal, and people should go to jail for it. But it's far from the biggest thing wrong with our financial markets and institutions.
In other words, the deal Geithner is now lauding required that interest rates remain unnaturally low for six years and counting. And those low rates cost American savers many, many times the amount of money the government made on its bank deals.