Worse Than Timmy

Yglesias reminds us that the difference between guys like me and the wackos on the right is that while both of us want to see Timmy gone, there are very, very stupid choices being floated by conservatives right now for Timmy's replacement.

If you have some money automatically deducted from your paycheck and put into a 401(k), the value of your investments will go up during booms, but down during busts and recessions. Nobody would, I think, consider you to be a genius investor. But on Wall Street, if you make a lot of money during booms and then lose all your money and require a government bailout during a bust, that’s considered “no one could have predicted” territory and it’s very important to pay you millions of dollars lest your unique talents be lost. In this universe, someone like Jamie Dimon of JP Morgan who ran a company that not only managed to make a lot of money during the boom, but actually lost less money than other companies, is considered to be an enormous genius.

Thus, from inside this alternative universe you get things like a David Reilly columm for Bloomberg in which he suggests firing Timothy Geithner and replacing him with Dimon. Of course, by Wall Street logic that’s technically impossible since nobody takes jobs unless they pay millions of dollars. But what’s really striking here is how stunningly out of touch it is with the public mood. I think that if you put a bank CEO in charge of the Treasury, that might end with the building getting burned down.

Yes, that Jamie Dimon, the same one who said this about the American people:

"I don't think just because someone's underwater they say I don't have to stay there. But they're supposed to pay the mortgage, and we should teach the American people, you're supposed to meet your obligations, not run from them. Because you have a mortgage doesn't mean you should run away as it goes down.

The same Jamie Dimon who said this about Wall Street:

“When I hear the constant vilification of corporate America, I personally don’t understand it. I would ask a lot of our folks in government to stop doing it because I think it’s hurting our country.”

Yeah. That guy. This arrogant douchebag who wrecked JP Morgan Chase and blamed you for it. This is the guy that Bloomberg's David Reilly thinks would somehow be a better choice than Timmy.

You gotta be f'ckin kiddin' me.