Treasury Department of one

If you had to pick one thing that would be the most terrifying thing you had to hear about the financial crisis, what would it be? That analysts were predicting a barrel of oil would cost more than the entire worth of the Dow Jones Index? That to cut down on resource consumption, feral animals were being loosed into the country to kill citizens at random? That Obama was hightailing it to London to live as President-in-exile until "the worst of the early skirmishes of Civil War II were over"? That the man tasked with planning the fixing of our financial system, administering the bailouts, and creating new regulations was working with a bare bones, skeleton crew department? Good news, only that last one is true.....for now.

In the six weeks since Mr. Geithner took over as Treasury secretary, he and a skeleton crew of unofficial senior advisers have been racing to make decisions that will shape the future of the banking, insurance, housing and automobile industries.

But even as he maintains a frenetic pace — unveiling plans, testifying before Congress and negotiating new bailouts with the likes of Citigroup, General Motors and the American International Group — there are signs that events are getting ahead of him.
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Compounding the strain on the Treasury, almost all the top posts beneath Mr. Geithner are still vacant. Though he has hired about 50 senior advisers — about half the number he hopes to recruit — the White House has become so worried about potential tax problems and other issues in the backgrounds of candidates that it has nominated only a handful of people.
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That still left many positions, including the No. 2 post at Treasury, without even a nominee.

That's good, I mean our economy is pretty small an not that complex, so I'm thinking we only need 2-3 guys tops to get a handle on fixing it when it's in a complete tailspin. One to write all the new regulations, one to administer all the money, and one to prepare the suicide pills and write the suicide note to explain to future societies what exactly happened before the economy crumbled.

Worse still, Obama is afraid of bad publicity on tax info to nominate anyone with any speed. Apparently if you're any good at this whole financial game, you're probably also an obvious tax cheat. Why not just push through nominees irrespective of their relative "scandal" status because while fixing the economy, though massively important, might not happen, it might be smart to have a full staff making the attempt? I don't know, either. I think in times like this, not taking a cheap political hit off of manufactured Republican outrage is more important than having a Treasury Department comprised of more than one person.