NYT: Sex Over Death on the Front Page

I’m still hiatusing, but this at least deserves some pictorial comment. 

Here’s the top of the NYT home page right now:

Yeah, the biggest news in the world right now revolves around two wealthy white guys who had affairs within their offices.  Uh-huh.  Except… wait, if I scroll down a little… OK, more than a little…

Hey, over 1,000 people are dead in Indonesia! If only one of them had had an affair with a married co-worker (or with a co-worker’s wife), maybe they’d get to be the lead story tonight!

Good grief. At least Jon Gosselin isn’t on the cover.

The Week Ahead: Hello, September

As summer winds down, I’m trying to get a bit more discipline into my days.  One of the things I want to do is get better at marking what’s happening each week, with an intent to, y’know, revisit the things happening.  I thought today sounded like a promising day to start, because I can really ease into it — because surprisingly little is happening, officially, this week.

Congress:
Out of session and, like me, mourning Ted Kennedy.  Most members are back home relaxing with family, friends, and the strangers they want to vote for them.  Some are holding town hall meetings this week.  If you’re in Arkansas, for instance, you can catch Democrat Senator Blanche Lincoln holding three town hall meetings this week.  She’s not been a big fan of a public option so far, and she faces re-election in 2010.  Should be an interesting show.  Check the official home pages of your senators and representative for a schedule of public events, usually listed under press releases.

Many members will also be firing up their pens — and those of their hard-working staff members — to pen “God Bless the Working Man” columns for the Sunday papers next week.  Keep an eye out — should be particularly interesting to hear from those who killed the Employee Free Choice Act this year.

The White House:
President Obama arrived home from vacation yesterday (best story about this is from The Borowitz Report: “Bush Questions Brevity of Obama’s Vacation“).  My question: Did he have to kick Joe Biden out of his chair?

The President has no public events scheduled today, and the lead story at the White House blog is Michelle Obama’s garden.  Joe Biden is meeting with General Ray Odierno today.  One does hope the president might stop by.

Expect a statement at some point on the California wildfires.

Other Events:
Massachusetts Governor Deval Patrick will hold a press conference at 3 p.m. Eastern to discuss Ted Kennedy’s vacant Senate seat.

Wildfires raging in California will likely draw comment from the Interior Secretary and, if my bet is correct, the exterior Secretary of Global Warming, Mr. Gore, about the necessity of better forestry planning and attention to the environment.

The report of outgoing commander of NATO and American forces General Stanley McChrystal will leak widely and kick up more discussion of whether a troop increase is necessary in Afghanistan.  Expect some Democrats to grab this as an issue that seems safer to take a position on than Health Care; expect many Republicans to think the same thing.

Somewhere, expect both Tim Geithner and Ben Bernanke to order an expensive bottle of wine, perhaps to share, in celebration over the New York Times’s front page story about how the bank bailouts have made us a $4 billion profit.  With that kind of money, we could’ve bought Spider-Man.

More Public Broadcasting, Fewer Public Broadcaster Fights

I, too, am fascinated by the NYT’s tale of the détente organized between Bill O’Reilly and Keith Olbermann by their corporate overlords.  Glenn Greenwald has two of the best takes on why this is important and frightening, exposing in particular the danger of “GE’s silencing of Keith Olbermann” as “one of the most blatant examples yet of pernicious corporate control over America’s journalism.” I also found the Gawker pick-up of Greenwald’s piece about “The Secret Sleaze of Richard Wolffe” particularly telling — and particularly bizarre, coming from the increasingly corporate Gawker enterprise.

What’s interesting is that this isn’t a cut-and-dried case of censorship, at least not of the kind we usually scream about.  What’s forgotten within Greenwald’s screeds is that neither Olbermann nor O’Reilly began their campaigns against each other with the intent of actually revealing or making news.  O’Reilly isn’t running pieces about G.E. because he’s discovered new things about the company — he’s doing it to get at Olbermann.  Likewise, though I am on record as enjoying Keith Olbermann’s increasingly gimicky show, even I knew that the nightly attacks on O’Reilly weren’t really drawn from a desire to better inform the audience, but just from a desire to, well, preach to an already Bill O-hating choir about the dastardly methods of his closest competitor.  Both men found ways to trumpet themselves through the contest as the more honest, more reliable, and more popular alternative.  Both benefitted from ratings boosts.  This wasn’t a news fight — this was an ego fight, and all the better for news consumers if that part of it is ended.

That it’s been ended by corporate decree, however, is the worst case scenario.  O’Reilly should be free to report on G.E., just as Olbermann and his MSNBC colleagues shouldn’t be restricted from criticizing FOX coverage and commentary, which is often newsworthy.  What should have happened — and oh, how I wish it had — was that ratings would have eventually demanded a cessation to the hostilities, as viewers got fed up with the mutually assured promotion plan that the two shows seemed to have.  Yet we live in a country where fighting is still the most popular kind of drama to watch on TV.  If we think of these shows in terms of entertainment instead of news — which is often a perfectly fair frame for both — then it’s pretty easy to see that Bill O’Reilly fighting Keith Olbermann to the televised death would get ratings second only to Bill O’Reilly marrying Keith Olbermann in a sweeps-week surprise crossover.

Which frames this entire deal differently — why would networks willingly give up ratings?  I accept Greenwald’s position on this, that for G.E., the decision was based on a need to shore up their corporate reputation, and that FOX was reacting to Olbermann’s slowly rising ratings (and O’Reilly’s slightly declining numbers) in making their decision.  But what I wonder is if the ban won’t be lifted when both sides see that achieving a peaceful balance is actually counterproductive to their real goal: higher ratings and higher ad shares.

This brings me to a bit of hopeful news: PBS is looking forward to a funding increase from the government this year.  PBS President and CEO Paula Kerger told a gathering of TV critics that PBS is hopeful it will receive a $20 million raise this year to $450 million, after eight years of budget cuts under President Bush.  The AP says 15 percent of PBS’s budget comes from the government, meaning it raises 85 percent elsewhere, including from state governments and “from viewers like you”).  Here’s the beautiful part about PBS’s charter: it says explicitly (Sec. 438 (a)) that no:

department, agency, officer or employee of the United States [can] exercise any direction, supervision, or control over public telecommunications, or over the Corporation or any of its grantees or contractors, or over the charter or bylaws of the Corporation, or over the curriculum, program of instruction, or personnel of any educational institution, school system, or public telecommunications entity.

The same language appears again in Part C, barring the government from exercising any control over content or distribution, despite its financial contributions.

Wouldn’t it be nice if all news organizations had similar conventions behind them?

^{To start my own war of contentiousness within the media: There’s something delicious about linking to an AP story (that corporation of news that would rather no one linked to any of their content) when discussing PBS (that corporation open to all viewers), particularly when the AP story seems to have no original content.  I just couldn’t resist.}

Mr. Clinton Goes to North Korea: What a (Handy) Tool

Photo released by North Korean state media.

Current TV reporters Euna Lee and Laura Ling are going to be pardoned by North Korean President Kim Jong-il, as many folks (including OS’er Kathy Riordan) have noted.  They were sentenced in June to 12 years of hard labor.  This release (and it’s not yet confirmed whether they’ve already been released or are yet to be sent home) was arranged during a visit by former president Bill Clinton, and he’s getting the lion’s share of the credit for their release. 

I like Bill Clinton, too, but let’s take a breath before we name him Diplomat of the Century.  He was instrumental in winning amnesty for Laura Ling and Euna Lee, certainly — but as with any instrument, he was simply that: an instrument.  A tool.  I don’t mean that in the “dude, you’re a tool” way that’s so popular with les enfants de frat; I mean that Clinton was deployed the way that one deploys a hammer to a situation where there’s a nail sticking up. 

North Korea wanted a diplomat of a certain cachet to visit and make nice.  The former president/world traveler/husband of the Secretary of State was a perfect choice for this.  It’s the diplomatic equivalent of a Hallmark card: North Korea read it, flipped it over to the back, checked that the cost was appropriately high.  Since there’s a state-released photo of Clinton glaring in company with several glaring NK counterparts, including Kim Jong-Il, I’d say it was.  I expect that photo is being prepared for delivery to most of North Korea with captions like “Famous U.S. President Acquiesces to North Korean Superiority, Begs for Release of Criminals.”  Don’t forget, the State Department has recently switched from asking for the women to be released to asking for the women to be pardoned — admitting some culpability after earlier declaring the charges against them baseless.

I take this as a good sign, actually: North Korea demanding the ego-stroke of a visit and kow-towing from a top-level foreign dignitary is still North Korea seeking contact.  Yeah, it’s a pretty terrible way for them to arrange it — they basically demanded Clinton’s visit as ransom for two women’s lives.  Yet this is still, somehow, a step forward.  It’s North Korea playing on the world stage, even if it’s still likely at any moment they will pick up their game pieces (or possibly to snatch some of ours) and storm back home to sulk.

I’m glad the two women are being released, and I’m glad that Bill Clinton was the tool needed for the job.  What I’m really glad about, though, is the signal here that North Korea might be open to talking to the West more often.  Certainly, in this instance, the meeting happened completely on their terms and will likely be broadcast to their advantage, but once the talking stops, well… let’s hope it’s harder to stop.

Fireworks in Iran

While most of us were out celebrating yesterday¹, a major religious group in Iran took a stand [NYT] against the sham election.  The Association of Researchers and Teachers of Qum, a leading group of clerics, released a statement that appears to call the election fraudulent and the current government illegitimate, while also calling for the government to allow peaceful demonstrations and to stop its violent acts against citizens.

The Times didn’t speak with any of the clerics, but cites online sources for the statement, including the group’s official Web site and a BBC Persia story; I’ve read only the Google translation (h/t Anonymous Iran).  It seems like a possibly quite daring statement:

“This crack in the clerical establishment, and the fact they are siding with the people and Moussavi, in my view is the most historic crack in the 30 years of the Islamic republic,” said Abbas Milani, director of the Iranian Studies Program at Stanford University. “Remember, they are going against an election verified and sanctified by Khamenei.”

The announcement came on a day when Mr. Moussavi released documents detailing a campaign of fraud by the current president’s supporters, and as a close associate of the supreme leader called Mr. Moussavi and former President Mohammad Khatami “foreign agents,” saying they should be treated as criminals.

The government is also treating as criminals a number of detained Moussavi supporters, many of whom have now made video “confessions” where they apologize for acting as foreign agents and admit to trying to incite a revolution.  On Friday, a member of the Guardian Council — the group that officially codified the Iranian election — announced that the members of the British embassy that have been detained have already confessed and will be tried for “inciting protests.”  These taped, forced confessions are part of a broad, coordinated media campaign by the government to call Moussavi a tool of foreign power and to remind those who support him that they can easily face detention, humiliation, and torture.

Yes, Happy Independece Day.  I feel a bit more affection for my freedom to complain.

To pile a little more fun onto this fire, yesterday Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad told a group he wants to have open negotiations with President Obama in front of international media at the United Nations.  That particular declaration is either a dare or a truly desperate ploy — either he’s trying to get Obama to speak up more about Iran, so that he can further criticize Western involvement in the country, or he’s trying to shore up his own position by reminding the world he’s the chief diplomat.  He’s the president; he’s the winner.  It’s bait I hope Obama won’t take.

After a week of seeing Iran shoved off many front pages (though the New York Times continues to do great work and to give great placement to its stories), I hope the week starts with more attention.  The drama continues, and after this announcement, could even build.

^{1 I’d like to issue a personal and heartfelt thanks to LPSRocks for her sangria recipe.  It’s like fruity fireworks in a glass.}

Everyone Knew Michael Jackson

I am a child of the 80s, so for me, Michael Jackson holds a strange allure.  I was born too late to get in on any of the Jackson Five hype, and too young to really understand the brilliance of his early solo albums.  So for me, Michael Jackson — in his Thriller video, for instance — was always a bit of a cartoonish figure.  Moonwalking was a big thrill at my grade school, for instance; the single glove phenomenon was observed by an older cousin of mine until family taunting made him find another.

That aside, Jackson was also the first super celebrity I ever knew.  Everyone knew something about Michael Jackson.  Even in the days before Twitter and Facebook, before TMZ got its own TV show, before anyone had e-mail, before CNN was even a household name, everyone knew something about Michael Jackson.  He was cocktail fodder for my parents and their friends and someone we gushed about and sang along with at the skating rink.  I’m not sure his level of celebrity could be repeated today, in part because it was so spectacular, and so rare.

So it seems fitting, today, that the news of his death has traveled like wildfire.  I’m sitting in a coffee shop with my computer, and the news here came not from Twitter but through the drive-thru window, then through the barista who approached to see not if I could confirm the news but if I might be able to look up how he died.  The two girls behind me — probably about five years my junior, so children of the late Jackson era, the Paul McCartney-duo era — gasped when they heard the news, and immediately moved to telling their own brief memories of him — of his videos, of “Bad,” of wondering how old he could possibly be.  “I didn’t think he’d ever die,” one of the baristas said, later, as she conveyed the news to the next customer in the door.

Maybe he never will.

Murphy Wins NY-20 Race

I never get to write about good news, because I’m usually to involved in reading all the bad crap.  But today, I’m about to take some fairly awesome mocha-butter-cream frosted chocolate cupcakes to a pleasant afternoon meeting, and on my way out the door I’ve noticed something else that’s right with the world: Scott Murphy has officially won his Congressional race in New York.

Almost a month after a special election in a heavily Republican congressional district, the Democratic candidate claimed victory Friday when his GOP opponent conceded in a race that focused attention on President Barack Obama’s stimulus plan.

That last line is an interesting set-up for discussion of the race as a whole, and makes it seem like the close race — it came down to 400 votes — is a reflection of the current public sentiment about the stimulus plan.  In reality, it seems like a stretch to even say that this reflects with any accuracy the thoughts of New York’s 20th on the stimulus plan, since any number of issues drove voters to the polls.  But NY-20 was a conservative, though Democrat-leaning, district, so if things were closely divided there a month ago about the president’s stimulus plan, well, that’s not bad news.  If the GOP was going to pick off a district based on spending plans, this would’ve been the place to start.

Instead, it’s one more Democrat in the House, a Democrat with business experience, and a Democrat endorsed by the President.  (And, interestingly, a Democrat who went to the same Missouri high school as a few of my family members.  Though not at the same time).  Not a bad way to start the weekend.

Cupcake?

WSJ: Chrysler Heads to Bankruptcy, Or Fiat, Or Not, Or…?

The Wall Street Journal has a rambling piece about the possible future of Chrysler that starts with this:

Chrysler LLC is preparing to file for Chapter 11 bankruptcy protection as soon as next week, whether or not it reaches a deal with its lenders or forges an alliance with Fiat SpA, said several people familiar with the matter.

This sentence kicks off an 1,100 word article in which only three words — “in its totality,” in the last line — are attributed to anyone by name.  The rest of the article quotes:

• “these people” (x4)
• “people familiar with the matters”
• “people familiar with the matter” (again)
• “Fiat” (no clarification on whether that’s the whole company, the signage out front, or someone’s talking car)
• “The Obama administration” (again, no clarification on whether they spoke united)
• “an administration official”
• “one person”
• “people familiar with the situation” (x2)
• “Obama advisers”
• “Officials with President Barack Obama’s auto task force”
• “people familiar with the talks”

That final quote from Fiat CEO Sergio Marchionne came from a conference call.

From this combination, it’s hard to figure out whether there’s any original reporting at all in this story.  It’s also hard to tell what qualifies one to be a person familiar with the situation — let’s hope it requires more than just reading WSJ coverage every day.

The point the story starts out making — that Chrysler is going into bankruptcy even if it cuts a deal with its lenders — is seriously undercut by anonymous quotes within.  We start with the above lede, then travel to someone in the administration and an unnamed Fiat negotiator saying that bankruptcy won’t be necessary, travel to a Chrysler source saying to lenders (via some third party source) that yes, they’re going into bankruptcy so Fiat can pick and choose pieces of Chryster, then finally land on Marchionne’s quote that Fiat is “interested in Chrysler ‘in its totality.'”  In the middle, there’s a side-show story about Fiat seeking a possible merger with G.M. — and the story says both that this will be only a takeover of G.M. European Opel division and a way for Fiat to spread into the American market.

I should not be more confused at the end of the story than I am at the beginning — unless the point of the story is to show the chaos that’s currently reigning within automaker negotiations.  What I get a sense of here instead is the chaos in the newsroom of a paper that sees itself as the premiere source of business news in the country.  Really, it took five reporters to write this?

A friend on OS asked a while back why there aren’t any embeds in the financial crisis — people on the ground, covering the story from within, sending reports back from the front lines.  I spent some time trying to answer this, and kept coming back to the same problem: Embedding a reporter in a bank — in any private enterprise — would seem to be a breach of privacy.  At best, even assuming a reporter did get internal access to the major goings-on, I figured we’d end up with some Bob Woodward-like book on the financial crisis a year after things are concluded, revealing who made who do what and for how much (read that in any way you want — I assume it’s all very messy in the banking industry right now).

But while real-time insider reporting might not be feasible, actual reporting is necessary.  As I rarely spend a day making any calls myself, I’m lecturing from a glass podium on a stage made of very thin crystal — but I’m an unpaid opinion writer, whereas the five reporters who contributed to this Wall Street Journal article about what could be one of the more important financial incidents in a year that hasn’t yet been boring get paid to go out and report the news.  That means not just talking to sources, but getting them to go on the record — and when they won’t go on the record, it means finding more sources who will.  It means telling a story that makes sense, and that’s credible, and that can be tracked and proven.

It also means reporting without a pre-set agenda.  Consider these three paragraphs:

Reorganizing three auto makers on three continents could move the world-wide car industry a big step toward the kind of large-scale consolidation that long has been overdue. For years, auto makers have struggled with excess capacity that has fostered intense price competition and squeezed profits.

The problem has festered because stronger car makers have steadily added plants while governments often have stepped in to prop up ailing car companies to preserve jobs.

Any bid to restructure three auto makers is likely to prove highly complex and risky for the companies involved and the Obama administration. Chrysler is in such bad shape precisely because its cross-border merger with Daimler AG ended in failure after eight years.

That may all be true, but I have no idea who’s claiming it.  Who says consolidation is long overdue?  The reporters?  Half of the reporters?  An unnamed source?  The Wall Street Journal itself?

Hundreds of experts exist in the U.S. who would have been willing to assist in this story, even on a Thursday when there’s good new T.V. to watch.  Likewise, though perhaps no one directly involved with the ongoing negotiations might be willing to go on the record, official sources at all of the companies involved get paid to answer media inquiries, and I bet even their non-denial denials of the statements above would have told us something.

Beyond even that, every time the government thinks about making a deal, a tree dies.  There’s paper out there.  Someone must have been willing to hand over a report or a sketch of where things could be headed.  Someone must be already working on the court filing for Chrysler.

I agree whole-heartedly with Glenn Greenwald that anonymity is being granted all too often these days, and I think we’re in more danger of being complacent about it when it appears in an article full of numbers and semi-familiar economic arguments.  The more complex the argument, the more carefully it should be explained.  The more controversial the event, the higher the bar for granting anonymity.

The more I read of the Wall Street Journal, the more frustrated I get.

GM Defaults?

The Wall Street Journal is reporting that G.M.’s Cheif Financial Officer said  today that the company won’t be making its June 1 $1 billion debt payment.  The statement is unclear as to whether G.M. isn’t going to make the payment because it believes there will already be an alternative arrangement — either a debt-for-equity swap or bankruptcy, the latter of which CFO Young calls “probable” — in place, or whether they are simply saying that, yes, they’re going to default because they can’t pay.  It’s so unclear, in fact, that the WSJ headline is “GM Plans to Skip $1 Billion Debt Payment,” and, skipping being the recognized economic term that it is, the article is getting some pretty amusing responses in the comments.

So I contacted G.M., and here’s their statement:

A successful bond exchange is an essential element of our out of court restructuring efforts, and we are working aggressively to launch an exchange.  That exchange could still be in process on June 1.  In which case, we would not expect to make the June 1st Series D bond payment.  Should we be required to finish our restructuring within the court process, the June 1 bond payment would be unlikely as well.

It sounds like G.M. is trying to acknowledge both reality — they’re not going to make this payment — and fiction — but they could if they wanted to.  The benefit of the former is that a G.M. default has been talked about for a long time, so acknowledging the inevitable isn’t a bad strategy.  The benefit of the latter is that it sort of makes it look like G.M. is getting pushed into default by the government or its creditors — which might play to some (though not perhaps the best and brightest) as this being Not G.M.’s Fault.

But it is.  Maybe the default will scare some sense into its large bondholders, and the debt-for-equity swap will happen.  Really, though, this makes bankruptcy seem very, very likely.

Small Wonder: A Terrible Day for Tim Geithner

Felix Salmon had a nice post today suggesting that major U.S. banks holding Chrysler’s debt are willing to let the company go into bankruptcy instead of taking a haircut on their debt in part because there’s no real way the public could think less of them.  Being the automatic villain gives one a certain freedom to be horrible, and J.P. Morgan Chase and friends certainly find themselves there.

What this made me wonder is, at what point will Tim Geithner hit the so-hated-he-can-do-whatever stage?

I mean, this has been a totally sucky week to be Geithner.  Consider he went into the weekend with Paul Krugman’s “it’s gonna get so much worse” column and Rachel Maddow having invited the “Hey Paul Krugman” singer onto her show (for the 5 people who hadn’t already heard him sing, “Timothy Geithner, he’s like some little weasel,” via the Internet).  Yesterday, he had the hey-guys, cut-your-budgets Cabinet meeting (check out the body language here, too — that’s Geithner slumped next to Biden).  At this point, I’m not sure the man could buy friends (though I have no doubt at least one commenter will say he’s tried).  Just take the last 24 hours:

• The Special Inspector General issued his report, which initially made news for saying that, contrary to the Secretary’s earlier assertions, firms who wanted to participate on either side of the Public-Private Investment Partnerships would be subject to compensation limits.
• Then it made news because, at The Economist, that sounds like the end of the PPIP.
• Then it made news because there are already 20 fraud cases being investigated.
• Then Felix Salmon pointed out that, within the report, there’s open speculation that it could encourage out-right criminal organization money-laundering schemes.
• The IMF also released its Global Financial Stability Report today, and said that bank losses are over $4 trillion, with more than half of that originating in the U.S.  Oh, and we’re going to need substantial additional investment to recapitalize banks, and may need to nationalize some at least temporarily.  And soon.
• All of this before the real fun started: Geithner testified before Elizabeth Warren’s Congressional Oversight Panel.  You may remember her as the woman who made Jon Stewart feel better last week, or the one who released the highly critical — and commendable, at that — report on the Treasury’s plans so far.  Wanna guess how that meeting went down?  Let Andrew Leonard summarize:

The pattern is now sufficiently well established to be definitive. The treasury secretary appears before a congressional committee, and is asked tough, detailed questions by members of both parties. He invariably compliments and thanks the questioner for a “thoughtful” and “important” question, and then proceeds to answer in vague generalities, rarely committing himself to specifics.

I’ve watched or pored over the transcripts of almost all of Geithner’s testimony before Congress, and it’s getting harder and harder to make a case in defense of his brief tenure. Tuesday’s hearing, before the Congressional Oversight Panel empowered by Congress to watch over the TARP program, ranks as one of his least satisfying performances so far. 

(I would say it was sort of like watching the robot from Small Wonder face off with Minerva McGonagall from Harry Potter — you start off rooting for both sides, but by the end, you just want McGonagall to put the robot out of her repetitve, wide-eyed misery).

• The stock market did rally a bit over Geithner’s assertion that “the vast majority of banks have more capital than they need to be considered well capitalized by their regulators.”  That sounds like great news, until you realize he never said that (he skipped those pages, somewhat dramatically, in his testimony).
• Also, even if he had said that, it was meaningless and earned, again, bafflement and concern (and use of the word “ominous” in the first paragraph) from Paul Krugman.
• Finally, The Wall Street Journal ran an interview with Geithner (“Geithner Weighs Bank Repayments“) where he said he’s considering whether to let banks repay their TARP debt early or not.
• Finance blogger Nemo and a reader point out that, no, he can’t do that — he has to let banks pay the money back whenever they want to.  Strike… what? 56 or so? for Geithner.

It’s those last two points that bring us to the importance of the villain question.  The two banks currently talking about repayment are Goldman Sachs and J.P. Morgan Chase.  Paying back TARP funds would free these two from compensation limits — present and looming — and also make them look strong and solvent.  JPMC CEO Jamie Dimon has called TARP assistance a “scarlet letter,” and he’s looking to shed it as quickly as possible.  This would possibly inspire further investment in these banks and certainly encourage concentration of power into their hands.

Which is partly why the Treasury Department isn’t keen on just letting them repay so quickly.  Banks shedding TARP funds could make other banks want to jump ship — banks whose life-vests aren’t properly inflated.  So you could see Bank of America trying to pay back TARP, and either failing after payback, or failing to payback at all — and either way looking so weak as to inspire (who thought it was possible) less confidence than even now.  Which would, of course, benefit those who do survive the leap — probably a big part of the JPMC/Goldman dream right now.

In fact, the only reason that a firm wouldn’t leave TARP right now is a desire NOT to piss off the U.S. Treasury Department.  It’s in their individual interests to run, even while it might be in the interest of the entire system for them to stay a while.  So let me ask you this: Is Tim Geithner someone you’d want mad at you?  Does a real villain lurk somewhere within the Small Wonder facade, just waiting for the day when it no longer matters what Wall Street thinks — and if so, was today that day?  Does he have enough power, inside or out of the Treasury, to make things more uncomfortable for these banks than they already are?

My guess?  If there’s pressure to be brought to bear, it will have to be done by the President — and if that’s the case, Geithner’s days at the grown-up table are going to be limited.