Neil Barofsky, author of “Bailout” and former overseer of the Troubled Asset Relief Program, says that as a Bush appointee and lifelong Democrat, he hoped the Obama administration would stop the power that financial institutions wielded in Washington, but instead there was more of the same. “There was almost no noticeable change when it came to the administration when it came to that deference to Wall Street,” Barofsky says. He also says Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner’s actions on TARP are a symptom of a larger problem of kowtowing to banks, and he calls for Geithner’s removal. Barofsky says, “I think that he should be removed because of the policy choices that he made, because of his disastrous oversight of the TARP program, because of its failure to meet those main street goals that should have been just as important as their ferocious commitment to save the too-big-to-fail banks.”
