Is I mentioned earlier, small business lender CIT went bankrupt, and cost the taxpayers $2.3 billion.

It now appears that this happened because Timothy “Eddie Haskell” Geithner completely screwed the pooch on the lend of TARP money:

But here’s the bad news: While senior debt holders will only lose 30% of their investment, we, the U.S. taxpayer, will lose the entire $2.3 billion we lent the company this summer.

William Black, professor at the University of Missouri-Kansas City School of Law is dumbfounded. “We put ourselves on the hook in a completely inept way where we lose first. We lose entirely as the taxpayers.”

….

The government was in no way obligated to lend the struggling CIT money and, in fact, initially refused to provide it bailout funds. More importantly, being the lender of last resort, the government should have guaranteed we’d be the first to get paid if CIT eventually filed Chapter 11. By failing to do so, “it’s like he [Geithner] burned billions of dollars again in government money, our money, gratuitously,” says Black.

I think that this has gone beyond mere incompetence.

Timothy Geithner is a mole for Wall Street in general, and for Goldman Sachs in particular. First, we have him making AIG pay its swaps at 100¢ on the dollar, and now this.

This is not incompetence. This is regulatory capture. This is deliberate corruption to favor people who have mentored him throughout his career, and it’s happening because Geithner knows that when he leaves, he will get a senior executive position at one of those Wall Street firms for millions of dollars a year.