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The Treasury Department's bailout of high finance was Story of the Day again. Monday's lead had been Secretary Timothy Geithner's Public-Private Investment Program to purchase sub-par securities from major banks. Now Geithner appears on Capitol Hill with Chairman Benjamin Bernanke to lobby for an expansion of the Treasury Department's power to enable it to nationalize those failing financial institutions that are not banks. ABC led with proposed financial regulatory reform from the White House; NBC from Capitol Hill. CBS chose Barack Obama's push to get his budget passed, instead, as the three newscasts selected varying angles in anticipation of the President's primetime press conference. ABC anchor Charles Gibson continued his road trip, broadcasting from Houston for the second night in a row.

Both Geithner and Bernanke used last week's scandal over the bonuses paid to rogue traders at American International Group to argue that the Treasury Department should be able to take financial firms such as insurance companies into conservatorship, in the same way that the FDIC can take over banks. "Would it help taxpayers to feel more secure that greedy practices would not get in the way?" wondered NBC's Kelly O'Donnell. "Or would it be too much control in the hands of Treasury, already in the middle of this financial mess?" When Chairman Bernanke testified that the Federal Reserve Board had decided not to block the AIG bonuses because it would likely have been struck down by Connecticut law, CBS' Nancy Cordes checked with that state's Attorney General Richard Blumenthal. He disagreed: "If the Fed had called we would have given the green light to sue."


Andrew Tyndall 3/25/09 6:19:56 pm

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