Yea right, if you believe this I have some cheap land for sale in Florida.-Lou

Geithner Says No Tilt to Goldman

By DEBORAH SOLOMON

WASHINGTON -- Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner said Friday that government officials acted appropriately in their dealings with Goldman Sachs Group Inc. during the heat of the financial crisis last year.

Some lawmakers have questioned whether ties between government officials and Goldman Sachs influenced their decisions about which financial firms should be saved. The government's rescue efforts weren't intended to benefit Goldman but to prevent a broader collapse of the financial system, Mr. Geithner said in an interview with The Wall Street Journal and Digg, an online site where 39 million users share articles with one another and rate their popularity. Mr. Geithner was responding to questions submitted and voted on by Digg users in partnership with the Wall Street Journal.

We have been forced to do just extraordinary things and, frankly, offensive things to help save the economy," Mr. Geithner said. "I am completely confident that none of those decisions…had anything to do with the specific interest of any individual firm, much less Goldman Sachs."
Questions were raised about the government's decision to allow the collapse of Lehman Brothers, a Goldman Sachs competitor, and the decision to prop up American International Group Inc., a counterparty to Goldman that subsequently paid the Wall Street firm about $13 billion.

Much of the criticism has been aimed at former Treasury Secretary Henry Paulson, the onetime chief executive of Goldman Sachs who was aided at Treasury by a bevy of advisers with ties to the firm.

Mr. Paulson told lawmakers during a congressional hearing last month that government ethics lawyers gave him a waiver allowing him to talk with his former company last fall "when it became clear that we had some very significant issues with Goldman Sachs." While he was instrumental in the rescue of AIG, he told lawmakers he "had no role whatsoever in any of the Fed's decision regarding payments to any of AIG's creditors or counterparties."

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