Tim Geithner and Jeb Bush in the same scandal-plagued blog post

Is there a label for “read this and weep?” That’s the category for this Truthdig story about a scandal reported in the Wall Street Journal. It’s about the NY Federal Reserve Bank and the crony way they do business with a wink at the rules.

As the piece asks, where is the outcry? Is there silence because Timothy Geithner is one of the actors in this scandal and it’s not PC to tarnish his name? The reason given for his falling in line was that it would help find a successor for him at the New York Federal Reserve as he became secretary of the treasury. Pretty lame.

If this isn’t rolled out and fixed somehow, a few years down the line we’ll see how rich Geithner gets when he leaves government work and returns to the world of private finance. This falls into a category I call the delayed bribe.

And speaking of that, there’s an article on the bottom of p. 1 of the Miami Herald business section today that got my steam up.

Faithful readers will recognize one of my hobbyhorses – the role that Jeb Bush played in the ripoff of Florida’s money-market fund when Lehman Brothers went bankrupt. To summarize, while he was governor Lehman was permitted to sell its junk to the money-market-like fund where local governments can park money until needed to pay police, fire, schools, staff, construction – you know, all the stuff we expect from government.

According to the Herald article, it cost Florida $300 million when Lehman went south. By then, Jeb Bush was a consultant to Lehman raking in an amount I’d like to hear from his lips or accountants.

Here's a link to one of my early posts on this, with numerous links therein to background on this little-known fiasco. Well, it's about only a couple hundred millions of dollars -- not the billions and trillions that we're used to.

If you look down into the comments of the Herald story you’ll find what I posted there this afternoon. I reproduce below in case it’s been whited out.

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LarryThorson wrote on 05/06/2009 04:05:53 PM:

I'd appreciate this article more if it pointed out that former Gov. Jeb Bush became a consultant to Lehman brothers after leaving office. And that he had ushered Lehman's junk into the Florida state money-market fund when he was governor. I call his lucrative employment with Lehman a delayed bribe. If Jeb came to a pizza parlor in my town on a listening tour, and I got to the microphone, I'd ask how much Lehman paid him, and when he's giving it to the ripped-off Florida treasury.