Treasury Adds An Economist....

....and a pretty poor one, may I add. I thought that the Obama administration was going to be the dawn of light and reason! Instead we get knaves, crooks, fools, and now...rank incompetents:

The Wall Street Journal reports:

Citigroup Inc.'s chief economist is leaving the company for a job at the Treasury Department, according to an internal Citigroup memo.
Lewis Alexander, who has been at Citigroup since 1999 and before that worked at the Federal Reserve, will head to the Treasury "to work on domestic financial issues," said the Citigroup memo, which was sent Tuesday.
According to a government official, Mr. Alexander will be a counselor to Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner.

Mr. Alexander's role as Citigroup's chief economist didn't entail significant management responsibilities. But his optimistic economic forecasts colored executives' views that the U.S. was unlikely to face a prolonged slump.
"I think that's not going to spill over more broadly into the economy, and so I think we're going to have a normal kind of housing cycle that's going to last through the middle of this year," Mr. Alexander said in a 2007 interview on PBS.
In the past five quarters, Citigroup has booked a total of more than $37 billion in net losses, largely stemming from the company's overexposure to the U.S. real-estate sector.

So "Tiny Tim" Geithner's ear will be owned by a man who brazen called the economy completely and utterly wrong as it was on the verge of a meltdown, influencing other financial firms who counted on his position and "expertise" as a high-ranking private sector economist.

What other baffling predictions and incoherent remedies can we expect in the upcoming months from Geithner & Alexander? Wait, don't answer yet, 'cause there's a ton of positions still to be filled in Treasury. Note there is no rush among the best and brightest of the private sector to take any of them (wonder why? Because they are capitalists, not socialists?). So expect the remaining slots to be filled by more men of Alexander's ilks, folks with impressive resumes but no accomplishments to speak of.

Sounds like a certain president I know....