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The First Question At Obama's Presser...

 

 ...didn't quite make sense to me. As I heard it, the question was something like: Your Treasury secretary asked Congress today for more authority to reorganize large, troubled financial institutions like AIG. In light of the recent controversies like last week's bonus scandal, why should we trust your administration with that authority?

Huh? Aren't the abuses precisely the reason you'd want to give the administration more authority? Seems like the problem we have now is that we're on the hook for keeping some of these institutions afloat, but we don't have the authority to run them, which is one reason you get weird things like big bonuses for people who helped bring their companies to their knees...

Anyway, I thought Obama managed to make these points pretty gracefully.

--Noam Scheiber