To: Austan Goolsbee

Would you have time to fix the “too big to fail” situation?

This truly is a worthwhile government intervention.

My suggestion would be to tweak the anti-trust laws from monopolies to oligopolies. The intent of the law is the same. Canada has 5 major national banks. The competition keeps them honest both for the “big deals” and fighting on every street corner for retail business. I don’t know how scaling up works but maybe 15 would be a good number for America. There is the issue of, how big do you have to be, for international statue. This issue really bugs Canadian bankers but they were spared the 2008 melt down.

For me, anti-trust has had a checkered record. The Standard Oil, AT&T, Alcoa, and railroad breakups seemed to fight up stream, against a current that wants to consolidate. Bigness does produce problems but we didn’t get the competitive market place we were looking for either. The battles against IBM and Microsoft seemed so right but ended in futility. Ultimately, the market place took care of them.

Two things I learned at community college.
Accounting 101 – Assets are valued at the lesser of book value or fair market value.
The Obama administration never took Accounting 101 when dealing with the housing crisis.

Electronics 102 – My instructor said “Those who can – do. Those who can’t – teach.”
What can you possibly teach - “How I screwed up in my time at government.”?
I know you were against the right wing agenda. It’s truly surprising how many believe in less tax and less government. No one advocates my desire for smart government at reasonable cost. The case for government was hurt by Geithner’s excesses in giving away money to the banks like Goldman Sachs yet failing citizens whose homes were underwater especially if they could have paid a market value mortgage. This example of bad government gives government a bad name. I believe you, like Obama, were well intentioned but didn’t seem to know how to operate the levers of power and failed to make a difference.

The press has made you out to be a real wimp - afraid to lose tenure. What’s wrong with joining the 9.1% of Americans who are unemployed? What will be sweet revenge for them, will be seeing Obama in the unemployment line-up in late November 2012. They might not understand how bad things could get if the Tea Party prevails but Geithner really did screw things up for Obama. Obama never caught on.

Why don’t you check out Peter Orszag’s head hunter- Pete’s Vice Chairman Global Banking Citi.