Mmm, what a tasty way to start a Tuesday morning — with reports of an obscenity-laden tussle between government money nerds over the very sexy topic of bank regulation! Here is what you need to know: Tim Geithner wants a single authority called the National Bank Supervisor providing oversight over our nation’s many banks, and Sheila Bair opposes this consolidation. On Friday, Geithner gathered Bair and Ben Bernanke and Mary Schapiro, the SEC Chairman, to quit running their yaps to newspapers about how much they hated all his ideas. MORE »

Whoa, weird, Fox Business News has a delightful scoop today! They won a suit against the Treasury to release 10,000 pages in TARP-related government records, and for the good of mankind have already found a couple of funny anecdotes revealing cartoonish confusion and conflict. We’re starting to understand the mechanics of how AIG rips off the federal government so easily: the old racist means of pitting the bureaucrats against each other until they’ve all been killed off. MORE »

• THESE GODDAMN PEOPLE: Chris Dodd admits to writing the bonus loophole that allowed AIG to give out all of these bonuses, but uhhh the Treasury made him do it, which he wouldn’t have done otherwise, but hey it still happened. OPEN THREAD. [Huffington Post]

Eek, would you want to be locked in a room getting yelled at by Henry Waxman for hours and hours? Because that is how Tim Geithner got to spend his Monday night, hooray! He has the worst job in America, worse even than those people who clean up murder scenes or give Rush Limbaugh enemas. MORE »

At some point during Barack Obama’s press conference last night — toward the end, after summarizing the major works of the European baroque period, but before reading the entire text of War and Peace in response to a question about baseball — he told reporters to hold onto their pants, because Tim Geithner’s first big press conference Tuesday morning was going to blow their fucking minds. How did it go? Eh, big numbers being tossed around, a lot of crying, the whimpering sounds of a crumbling Empire, crumbling, crumble crumb crumb… MORE »

Financial wizard Timothy Geithner is thisclose to becoming our next President of Money, but two things stand in his way: he failed to file payroll taxes for a few years, and he hired a housekeeper who was a temporary space alien. One can’t do anything about his monster-changeling maid, as this is a common affliction of people who apply for fancy cabinet positions, but the tax thing obviously cannot stand. However, Senator Chuck Grassley — a veritable Republican, and thus a hater of all things tax-related — tried to help him out in a hearing today. MORE »

Oh everybody was soooo excited that this New York guy, Tim “Timothy” Geithner, had deigned to be Barack Obama’s treasury secretary. But now it comes out that for several years he paid state and federal income taxes but no payroll taxes! Well, everybody knows that payroll taxes are just for poor people anyway. They’re not even “real” taxes. MORE »

Money-printing liquidity trapper Ben Bernanke has been a Local Loser in recent months after rapidly cutting the federal funds rate to negative 1,000% to no effect whatsoever, except national embarrassment. He’s had to print Master Paulson’s money, alone, every night, as punishment. He is not allowed to shave. But as Paulson and his flack Neel “Chump” Kashkari refuse to do anything right, Bernanke’s had enough and he’s just going to sing it from the rooftops of America! Today, in a big speech, he declared that the “government must step up efforts to prevent home foreclosures, with options including buying delinquent mortgages and providing bigger incentives for refinancing loans.” Meanwhile, back in their lair, Paulson and Kashkari are discussing what evil they must next bring to the global economy. MORE »

Oh dang! Rumor has it that Tim Geithner, our Treasury Secretary-to-be, does not care for our beloved Sheila Bair and her maverick ways. Bair is the chairman of the FDIC and one of the few high-profile Bush administration appointees to very repeatedly and publicly bang the drum about how if our financial crisis is ultimately due to people’s mortgages going south, maybe we ought to work on fixing those bad mortgages. She’s a working class hero! So naturally, Giethner hates her guts. MORE »

Your country, the United States, comes closer and closer to the brink of complete economic and militaristic (but mostly economic these days!) ruination with every passing second. Oh, don’t blame yourself, dear reader. Blame the government — yeah, you know the one! Because, due to a confluence of distant inaugurations, inept lame ducks and quietly ambitious second-tier Washington officials, we’ve got one foot in the Great New Depression II with the other about to step in… and yet we have no idea who is actually running the country! By our count, we have three (3) presidents right now, and they’re all just going around doing their own things while your money is literally dying. So which president, pray tell, is the REAL president right now? MORE »

• TARP II HAS AN ACTUAL NAME!: Our Government Money People were at least smart enough to realize that sequels almost always fail to live up to originals, so — knowing how well original TARP has performed so far (yikes!) — they have avoided calling the new $800 billion money bonfire “TARP II,” which probably would have resulted in the immediate nuking of everyone. Instead, it is playfully called the “Term Asset-Backed Securities Loan Facility (TALF).” Ha ha, “Securities” was cut out because it would’ve ruined the acronym. Anyway: Insider beltway gossip suggests that TARP has already developed a gay thing for TALF. Go get ‘em, TARPy. [Federal Reserve]