The Associated Press says Rahm is splitting tomorrow.
CHICAGO — Two people close to Rahm Emanuel said Thursday he will resign as White House chief of staff on Friday, and will begin his campaign for Chicago mayor by meeting with voters in the city on Monday.
The two people familiar with his plans, who spoke on condition of anonymity because they did not want to pre-empt Emanuel’s announcement, said he will return to Chicago over the weekend and begin touring neighborhoods on Monday.
“He intends to run for mayor,” one of the people told The Associated Press.
MSNBC reports that Pete Rouse will replace him as chief of staff, most likely on an interim basis.
Since Pete Rouse is not the devil, it is unclear who will now take the blame for everything that progressives don’t like.
Well .. Rouse isn’t going to be going around .. calling people names .. leaking stuff to Drudgico .. or otherwise generally giving people a good reason to hate him
Maybe you could focus more on the real problem.
I notice Republicans still have that problem with declaring as Republicans in their campaign ads. Now they’re even shying away from their usual red placards.
Oh wait WTF he’s a blue dog putting out an ad disavowing Pelosi while bragging about voting with Boehner 80% of the time. Even worse.
And who helped put that asshat in Congress?
Richard M. Daley
No, Rahm.
Rahm is/was Daley’s man.
Which asshat did you mean? I thought you were referring to Rahm.
Bobby Bright.
Ah!
That be as it may, likely Bright is going to lose.
Nate Silver’s model has him with a 68% chance of losing.
Robert Gibbs just announced that if the government sold its interests in AIG today it would net $20 billion, while a year ago it was assumed that it would cost us $180 billion. He also said (and he was less clear about this) that we will make money off of TARP. That’s the first time I’ve heard that. I knew that they’d gotten under a $100 billion loss, but a profit is outstanding news.
To go back to last year, I was nearly alone in defending Geithner’s Plan as an alternative to nationalizing the banks. I said nationalizing the banks would cost an astronomical amount of money and that it would be a guaranteed loss. Geithner’s Plan held out hope that we might get our money back. Waiting for apology from Hamsher any day now.
According to Bloomberg, AIG is trading at $38 and we will break even if we can sell it at $29.
Of course, Kansas City Fed President Thomas Hoenig tried his best to find a solution to those problems, but to no avail, as Ryan Avent details:
http://www.ryanavent.com/blog/?p=2005
Do you really think we are going to get repaid from AIG? If so, read this:
http://www.ritholtz.com/blog/2010/09/aig-repaying-uncle-sam-not-by-a-long-shot/
It’s not happening!!
And, we couldn’t nationalize the banks without an absurd amount of legal problems. People need to clarify what they mean when they say “nationalize.” I assume they mean receivership.
Problem: no legal authority exists.
If the government put them in receivership, the international mess would be so great because they each have their own bankruptcy procedures.
You may have been the only major blogger defending it, but I was right there with you from the get-go. It’s also why I still like Geithner.
They’ll yell at you still, though, saying banks aren’t lending 😛
The big banks are still insolvent today. The only reason they are not officially considered as so is by creative changes to accounting rules about bad debt.
Geithner’s plan is to rebuild the large banks balance sheets on the backs of two main things.
The first is the almost zero percent fed overnight lending rate which the banks are using to hoover the spread on credit card and other profitable short term debts. They are not passing any savings onto customers.
The second is based on fleecing their customers through ridiculous fees and other forms of usury. This is why Warren was so important, she stands, in theory, against this kind of abuse.
The main problem with Geithner’s plan is to fix the banks the economy is the Japanification of our economy. And, the bad mortgage and other debt by design cannot be purged from the system or the banks would be closed (FDIC)
The banks aren’t really lending because they are still in repair balance sheet mode. FWIW My friend who underwrites international shipping and uses this kind of lending to do commerce says he can only get foreign lending ( Letters of credit.) US banks are loath to do this right now.
Nationalizing was always going to be hard to do, having the FDIC take over Citi with 1500 branches and 7000 ATMs along with god knows what else was going to take an army of people. Too big to fail in a nutshell.
Financial institutions are borrowing funds at the overnight lending rate and using them to buy up T-bills at 3%, financing the national debt. That is a safe investment that nets as much or more than any other. And it makes the idea of running a deficit to massively fund infrastructure that will lower the cost of business when it is completed prudent instead of foolish.
Credit card rates are a huge issue, but mortgage foreclosures are a bigger one as we learn that contractors to banks have been phonying up the paperwork. The main problem with Geithner’s plan is failure to come to terms with foreclosures.
The main problem with getting banks back into banking is the lack of consumer and business purchasing demand; every business looks like a risky investment. Which means they can’t repair balance sheets even with the companies they normally would use to repair their balance sheets. And I lay the lack of demand issue squarely at the feet of the GOP in Congress, who put party before country.
Nationalizing would have meant the problems and risks with AIG written large. The army of people to do the takeover work could very well have been the current employees of the bank, minus the executive team. But even organizing that transition for multiple banks would be a bureaucratic nightmare.
NYT says that Rouse will not be merely interim.
NY Times
Retarded activists everywhere rejoiced.
When Rahm goes — and nothing changes — what then?
A Rahm observation. Has the man ever done anything well? It seems like everything he touches turns to sh*t.
Where did he ever get a “good” reputation?
He did manage to make himself a fortune in investment banking ($16.2 mil according to Wikipedia) and earned a measly $320k/yr as head of Freddie Mac.
From the TradMed of course.
“Since Pete Rouse is not the devil, it is unclear who will now take the blame for everything that progressives don’t like.”
Booman-this is a gratuitous slap and a perfect example of why I am no longer frequenting this and many other websites very often or at all. I don’t need to be insulted or condescended to. As a progressive, I’ve been on the right side of most of the issues, including the Vietnam and both Iraq Wars. And the various civil rights battles as well.
I grew up in Chicago and Democratic Party politics is what made me a Republican until Reagan, then an Independent, Peace and Freedom or Green until Bush came along. I still have family and friends in the area, and so far as they all are concerned, Emmanuel is a modern day version of the worst machine politics has to offer. When Obama appointed him, our hearts sank. We considered it a very, very bad sign.
It’s not gratuitous at all.
It’s aimed squarely at people who blame Rahm Emanuel for everything they don’t like about this administration. You never see people comment on things like this:
On the president’s biggest mistake of all, Rahm was lobbying for him to make the correct choice.
Things are more complicated than “Rahm is ruining the president’s progressive instincts.”
I’m glad to see Rahm go, but he isn’t the devil.
You’re lying. Woodward’s lying. Obama’s lying. Everyone’s lying.
Rahm’s making them lie. Why is that so hard to see?
Obama’s personnel strategy has been very interesting. A lot of appointments for which he pulled people from the Clinton or Bush II administrations are not leaving and being replaced by Obama people. They were used to be caretakers for two years and for Obama’s people to get up to speed about stuff they didn’t already know how to do. And to see how mistakes are made.
notnow ?Yup. Thanks.
Rouse’s resume looks like he actually knows what the duties of a chief of staff are. Rahm got into trouble because he did not know that a good chief of staff is neither seen nor heard. Most folks did not know that Presidents had chiefs of staff until Sherman Adams, Eisenhower’s chief of staff, got bribed with a vicuna coat. Not knowing that there is a chief of staff and who is the way it should be.
I’m never sure how much credit/blame to give Rahm Emanuel. He was just the gatekeeper, after all.
But someone should get the blame for the failure to pass (or even put to a vote) the Employment Non-Discrimination Act. And the failure to pass (or even put to a vote) the repeal of the Defense of Marriage Act.
And, of course, someone should get the blame for delaying the “Don’t Ask Don’t Tell” repeal vote, until it was impossible to pass.
Another Democratic President once said, “The buck stops here.” And he wasn’t referring to his chief of staff.