RUSH: On the Today Show today, Matt Lauer has this exchange with Obama’s chairwoman of the Council of Economic Advisors, Christina Romer. And, by the way, before she was appointed to this position, Christina Romer posted on one of her websites that every dollar in a tax cut will generate a dollar-and-a-half in increased economic activity. After she was appointed, they scrubbed that and replaced it with every dollar of government spending will increase economic activity by a dollar-and-a-half. So Christina Romer at her base root level is a supply-sider. But of course she had to broom all that when she joined the Bam administration. Now, this sound bite has Matt Lauer terrified that banks are going to start running their own business again without being under the thumb of government.
LAUER: People at Goldman are starting to talk about the possibility of paying off the bailout money ahead of schedule. And I’m worried if you think that’s a good thing. Are they doing this because of financial stability, or might they be talking about that simply to get out from under the thumb of the federal government and be allowed to go back to running the business the way they want to run it as opposed to the way the government wants them to run it?
ROMER: Any time an American company earns profits that’s a good thing. In terms of firms paying off their money from the government, the TARP money that they took, that’s going to be something that the regulators and the Treasury will be working with each bank to figure out if it is exactly a sign that they’re very healthy, but we certainly are going to be looking at that.
RUSH: Imagine, how appalled can you be? These banks might go back to running their business the way they want to run it, as opposed to the way the government wants them to run it. They want to give back the TARP money and Obama is telling them no. In many cases, you gotta keep the money. You can’t give the money back. By the way, I had this in the stack yesterday, and I didn’t have a chance to get to it, but this bankruptcy deal that they’re proposing for General Motors, the government is thinking of trading — and I knew this was coming, I myself predicted it. I’ll give you the next step after this one, ’cause I’ve also predicted that. Whatever the number of billions that the government has loaned General Motors or bailed out General Motors, $13 to $15 billion, whatever it is, the government is saying, if you go the bankruptcy route we want you to go, we’ll take that $13 billion in equity, in the company. Yeah, it’s in yesterday’s stack. I kept it because it’s stuff I didn’t get to yesterday.
So the government’s going to take some equity in General Motors. That’s their deal, if they go this soft bankruptcy route. Now, the next thing that will happen after that, the equity will be transferred to Ron Gettelfinger, either all of it or a portion of it, the equity in General Motors will be transferred to the United Auto Workers, returning the nation’s wealth to its rightful owners. Mark my words. Don’t be surprised if it happens. This is a continuation of the discussion with Matt Lauer and Christina Romer.
LAUER: Are you worried about companies like this and banking companies in particular going back to business as usual?
ROMER: No, because one of the things that the president will talk about in his speech is how we are going to be working on financial regulatory reform to make sure that we can’t, we can’t just go back to business as usual, to make sure that we go back to a stronger, more secure economy.
RUSH: Now, folks, I’m not going to sit here and tell you that the banks or any of these other companies that participated in bailout money were running aboveboard businesses at every stretch, but most of them were. Most private sector businesses are up and up. The assumption is just the exact opposite inside the Obama administration. ‘Oh, no, no, no, no, one of the things the president can talk about is how we’re going to be working on regulatory reform to make sure they can’t go back to business as usual,’ which means capitalism.