Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner cleaned out his office today. It’s his last day on the job. Coincidentally, or not, Wall Street kept on climbing. Bloomberg’s Nela Richardson says she has mixed feelings about Geithner’s legacy on the job.
“He was the man we needed at the time we needed him, but he had a lopsided record,” she says. “Banks are better capitalized, they’re better off than they were before the crisis, but they got bigger under his tenure. We still have 10 million homeowners who owe more on their mortgages than what their homes were worth. So lopsided, at best. He got us through the crisis, though.”
Meanwhile, the markets have remained on an upward scale, with the Dow and S&P reaching five-year highs. But CNBC’s John Carney warns this isn’t the time to drop everything into the markets.
“I would be very nervous. We’ve had a dramatic increase — we’re up 12 percent in the last two months or something,” says CNBC’s John Carney. “If I were an investor…I would say, you probably just missed the big rally. Don’t go piling into stocks right now.”
Listen to the audio above to hear all the analysis. And here are some weekend reading suggestions from our guests.
Richardson makes these picks:
- The New Yorker’s Jill Lepore asks how much military is enough. Defense cuts are a huge issue and large part of deficit reduction debates.
- Bloomberg Government’s Robert Litan writes about a backdoor way to cut down “too-big-to-fail” banks.
- From Al Gore, “the man who invented the Internet,” an article about how the Internet changes the way we think.
And Carney suggests these:
- Icahn vs. Ackman: Clash of the Titans.
- Huffington Post on Aaron Swartz, financial fraud and the Justice Department.
- Aleksey Vayner is dead.
There’s a lot happening in the world. Through it all, Marketplace is here for you.
You rely on Marketplace to break down the world’s events and tell you how it affects you in a fact-based, approachable way. We rely on your financial support to keep making that possible.
Your donation today powers the independent journalism that you rely on. For just $5/month, you can help sustain Marketplace so we can keep reporting on the things that matter to you.
