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Top female advisers felt left out by a boy's club in the White House where rampant infighting sabotaged the administration's economic decisions, according to a controversial new book. Sidelined and ignored in the West Wing, some women aides reportedly complained to President Obama about their treatment in 2009. In an excerpt obtained by the Washington Post, a female senior aide is quoted as calling the White House a hostile environment for women. Confidence Men: Wall Steet, Washington and the Education of a President, by journalist Ron Suskind, is due out in the shops next Tuesday. Former Communications Director Anita Dunn...

A new book offering an insider's account of the White House's response to the financial crisis says that U.S. Treasury Secretary Tim Geithner ignored an order from President Barack Obama calling for reconstruction of major banks. According to Pulitzer Prize-winning author Ron Suskind, the incident is just one of several in which Obama struggled with a divided group of advisers, some of whom he didn't initially consider for their high-profile roles. Suskind states that Obama accepts the blame for mismanagement in his administration while noting that restructuring the financial system was complicated and could have resulted in deeper financial harm....

The Obama White House is a "hostile" environment for women even though they occupy many of the senior positions in the West Wing, according to a new book. Pulitzer Prize-winning author Ron Suskind interviewed more than 200 people, including President Obama, for "Confidence Men: Wall Street, Washington, and The Education of A President," which will be released Sept. 20. "This place would be in court for a hostile workplace," former White House communications director Anita Dunn is quoted as saying, according to the Washington Post, which obtained a copy. "Because it actually fits all of the classic legal requirements for...

Like the discovery of gambling in “Casablanca,” the mainstream media is shocked, shocked! to learn there is chaos and back-stabbing in the Obama White House. The media missed the story for the same reason Capt. Renault missed gambling at Rick’s Cafe: They chose to. A cash kickback did the trick in the film. In real life, the Washington pack turns away from the truth for something less forgivable. Three years after President Obama took office, much of the national press corps remains remarkably uncurious about what has gone wrong inside the land of Hope & Change. Whether still mesmerized by...

Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner didn't dispute a Harvard economist's estimate that each job in the White House's jobs plan would cost $200,000, but said the pricetag is the wrong way to measure the bill's worth. And he also pointed out, in an interview today with ABC News' David Muir, that there is no other option on the table for getting the economy moving and putting more people back to work. "You've got to think about the costs of the alternatives," Geithner said when asked about Harvard economist Martin Feldstein's calculation that each job created by President Obama's American Jobs Act...

NEW YORK (AP) -- A new book offering an insider's account of the White House's response to the financial crisis says that U.S. Treasury Secretary Tim Geithner ignored an order from President Barack Obama calling for reconstruction of major banks. According to Pulitzer Prize-winning author Ron Suskind, the incident is just one of several in which Obama struggled with a divided group of advisers, some of whom he didn't initially consider for their high-profile roles. Suskind interviewed more than 200 people, including Obama, Geithner and other top officials for "Confidence Men: Wall Street, Washington, and The Education of A President,"...

After months of speculation that Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner would step down after the debt ceiling was raised, he told the President on Friday that he would stay. "Secretary Geithner has let the president know that he plans to stay on in his position at Treasury," according to a statement issued by Assistant Secretary for Public Affairs Jenni LeCompte. "He looks forward to the important work ahead on the challenges facing our great country." "The President asked Secretary Geithner to stay on a Treasury and welcomes his decision," said White House Press Secretary Jay Carney. Geithner was heavily involved in...

The first official demand for a change at the top as a result of the S&P downgrade has come in, courtesy of Indiana State Treasurer Richard Mourdock, who has just demanded the head of the most incompetent and tax evading Treasury Secretary in US history, on a silver platter. "President Obama should fire U.S. Secretary of the Treasury Tim Geithner over the debt downgrade. If Obama won't remove him, then the US Senate should withdraw its consent of Geithner's appointment to U.S. Treasury because someone in the White House needs to be held responsible for this disaster." Zero Hedge fully...

After the resolution of the debt-ceiling impasse, rumors have been flying that the last senior member of Barack Obama’s original economic team will call it quits. Treasury Secretary Tim Geithner refused to answer questions about his plans yesterday on ABC’s Good Morning America, which doesn’t exactly sound like a man planning on staying in the job much longer: Speculation is rife in Washington that Geithner, who has outlasted all of President Obama’s other original economic advisors, will resign now that the nation’s borrowing capacity has been extended to 2013 and a 10-year, $2.1 trillion deficit-reduction agreement enacted.Geithner’s consideration of a...

For a vision of how the Greek debt meltdown is going to end, look no further than the International Monetary Fund's post mortem into a similar crisis that came to a head almost exactly a decade ago - Lessons From The Crisis In Argentina. Substitute the word Greece for Argentina in the IMF's analysis of eight years ago, and you'd have a near perfect account of the present crisis The policy review document was originally published in October 2003 and signed off by then relatively unknown IMF official called Tim Geithner, now the US Treasury Secretary no less. Strangely enough,...

Imagine this, U.S. Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner read from the U.S. Constitution as he sat onstage for an interview with Politico's Mike Allen at the Newseum in Washington May 25, 2011. Not to uphold the constitution, but to make a case for raising the U.S. national debt limit. A bitter partisanship is escalating between the White House and Congress over raising the national debt ceiling. Republicans want to cut spending, while Democrats and the White House want more government. So the Treasurer to make his point utilizes the U.S. Constitution. Holding up a U.S. Constitution pocket-book to his audience, he...

Forget the birthers, the latest conspiracy theorists to sweep Washington are the "default deniers," a growing group of conservatives who think the prospect of a U.S. default is a hoax. Leading the charge is U.S. Sen. Pat Toomey (R-PA), a Tea Party-backed freshman who claims the Obama administration has greatly exaggerated the threat of the U.S. defaulting on its debt to scare Congress into raising the debt ceiling. As the debt ceiling debate heats up, Toomey's theory has gained surprising acceptance among some Republican lawmakers. Politico reports that nearly 100 House members and 22 senators have signed Toomey's Full Faith...

Just announced on the Treasury department blog...Today, the United States has reached the statutory debt limit. Secretary Geithner sent the following letter to Congress this morning alerting them to actions that have be taken to create additional headroom under the debt limit so that Treasury can continue funding obligations made by Congresses past and present. The Secretary declared a "debt issuance suspension period" for the Civil Service Retirement and Disability Fund, permitting Treasury to redeem a portion of existing Treasury securities held by that fund as investments and suspend issuance of new Treasury securities to that fund as investments. He...

OCALA - A former restaurant owner and chef was arrested Friday for refusal to pay or file tax return, theft of sales tax and failure to file six consecutive sales tax returns. Loring W. Felix, 52, was picked up by Sheriff's Deputy Brian Haworth at 2811 S.W. 19th Court at 7 a.m. He was taken to the Marion County Jail, where he was booked in. The warrant was signed by Judge Willard Pope on Monday. Bond for the charges was $7,500. Felix's Restaurant had been a fixture at 917 E. Silver Springs Blvd. for close to a decade before closing...

NEW YORK—New headwinds—most notably oil prices—confront the U.S. march to recovery, U.S. Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner said Tuesday. Unemployment, long a weak spot in the economy, remains "very high," and the economy feels "unfairly hard" to most Americans, Mr. Geithner said in comments that weighed on the dollar. He said oil prices at current levels, while challenging, weren't at levels that threaten to derail the recovery. First, though, U.S. lawmakers must agree to increase the debt limit, something some politicians have said they will not do unless there is broad agreement on massive cuts to a bloated federal budget. The...

If you think it's hard now to balance the budget, just wait until our credit rating gets trashed. Monday’s warning from the Standard & Poor’s rating agency -- that the U.S. government’s credit rating could be revised downward -- produced a firestorm in Washington. Republicans called it a "wake-up call," while the Obama administration's chief economist, Austan Goolsbee, lambasted Standard & Poor’s actions as purely "political." Credit ratings aren’t just a matter of national pride. Less dependable, risky borrowers have to pay a higher interest rate to get people to buy their bonds. Right now the our government only has...

Back in October, Treasury Secretary Tim Geithner gave a speech in which he answered a question about the U.S. dollar. Geithner said that America needed to "work hard to preserve confidence in the strong dollar." My, oh my, how quickly things change. This week, Geithner said he was "quite open" to the establishment of a new global reserve currency. The dollar plunged upon news of the statement, and one has to wonder, does the Obama administration really support America? In a column written in October, Lawrence Kudlow focused on Geithner's comments (or lack thereof) regarding the dollar. In fact, Geithner...

Sen. Jeff Sessions: “…Under your budget, the interest increases each year. It was $187 billion in 2009, under your proposal it increases to $844 billion” Treasury Tim Geithner: “Senator, absolutely, it is an excessively high interest burden, it’s unsustainable”

Round two of the economic crime of the century has begun. On January 12, Lawrence Summers, President Obama's designee to become director of his National Economic Council, sent a letter to congressional majority and minority leaders seeking the second half of the $750 billion approved by Congress last October.   Citing Obama's economic speech of January 8, Summers wrote: "As the President-elect recently stated, 'we start 2009 in the midst of a crisis unlike any other we have seen in our lifetime.'" As you no doubt recall, last September Congress, fearing the wrath of constituents, rejected a bailout scheme put together...

The United States Treasury concealed $40 billion in likely taxpayer losses on the bailout of the American International Group earlier this month, when it abandoned its usual method for valuing investments, according to a report by the special inspector general for the Troubled Asset Relief Program. “In our view, this is a significant failure in their transparency,” said Neil M. Barofsky, the inspector general, in an interview on Monday. In early October, the Treasury issued a report predicting that the taxpayers would ultimately lose just $5 billion on their investment in A.I.G., a remarkable outcome, since the insurance company was...