I have heard this on several occasions on the various news casts.  I have heard that he has NO idea what he is doing or that he has NO communication skills or that he does not instill confidence in the markets.  All in all pretty negative attitudes on the Secretary of Treasury.  I have also heard that Larry Summers would be a much better Treasury Secretary than Geithner.

We have heard all the BS on the handling of the economy.  All the pros and mostly cons….but are they handling it properly?

American officials like Larry Summers — now President Barack Obama’s economic guru — urged the Japanese to give up on failed institutions. Instead, Japan pumped 12 percent of its gross domestic product into saving the banks and got a “lost decade” of economic stagnation in return. Economic analysts across the board agree that the Japanese example must not be repeated, even as our lawmakers stumble into repeating it.

But yet, these “knowledgeable” economiosts are doing basically the same things that was done by the Japanese in the 90’s and we are to believe that it will have a different outcome this time because we are Americans and we do not make mistakes.

That is just all so much BS.

As it stands now, the U.S. government is keeping alive banks that would otherwise go bust at the same time it is hectoring them about lending more money — in other words, Japan redux. “Many banks continued to extend credit to insolvent borrowers, gambling that these firms would recover or that the government would bail them out,” wrote University of Chicago economist Anil K. Kashyap of Japan in the 1990s. “The Japanese government also encouraged banks to increase their lending to small and medium-sized firms to ease the credit crunch after 1998.”

The resulting misallocation of capital smothered growth. Tokyo short-circuited the natural churning of the capitalist system that is the only way to clear out failed companies and unproductive uses of capital. If the U.S. government keeps alive Chrysler and General Motors or Citigroup and Bank of America when they are no longer viable — and have rendered themselves such through poor business choices and foolish risk-taking — it will create a zombie economy without the capacity for self-renewal.

There is the problem in a nutshell….we are creating a “zombie” economy without the capacity for self-renewal.

IMO, then yes, Geithner and Summers should both go, getting back to the original question, neither of these guys learned nothing from the problems that the Japanese created from themselves and now they are creating the same circumstances in the US.  May I suggest that fresh blood is needed in Washington…people who understand the problem and have solutions, whether popular or not, as long as they repair the ailing economy.