Got change?

“It’s like he’s [Obama’s] still trying to have the presidency he was hoping for instead of the one he got.”

John Carney, The Business Insider

Since the failure of Lehman Brothers and the worsening of the global financial crisis did so much to put Barack Obama into White House (Bill Clinton thinks so, at least), you would have thought that the new administration would have more to say for itself vis-à-vis the crisis. Meh, not so much.

First, it cannot seem to be bothered with rounding out the team over at the Treasury Department. There’s Tim Geithner, and, well, there’s Tim…and, um, that’s about it. As Felix Salmon correctly noted yesterday, Treasury is probably the most important portfolio in the entire US Government, and yet Geithner is going it alone, or as Paul Volcker has been quoted all over the Internet:

“The Secretary of the Treasury is sitting there without a deputy, without any undersecretaries, without any, as far as I know, assistant secretaries responsible in substantive areas at a time of very severe crisis. He shouldn’t be sitting there alone.”

On a related topic, I had very high hopes that President Obama would hit the ground running in connection with the banking industry, that he would, in other words, have a plan to (a) price and purchase bad assets from the banks and (b) reconfigure financial regulation in a serious and thoughtful way. Foolishly, I really did think back in January that the series of band-aids and gauze pads applied by the Bush administration would be ripped off and we would commence with the bureaucratic surgery that is so direly needed. What we have gotten is more or less the same band-aid strategy for the banking industry, as if the Obama folks have little better idea what to do than their predecessors.

The $800 billion stimulus was hailed, rightly so I guess, as a landmark piece of legislation, certainly from the perspective of its size, but the stimulus will not solve the financial crisis. Only finance can solve a financial crisis, and as yet, there is still no plan in place to deal with the size and scope of the banking problem.