What exactly does Wall St banking contribute to the real economy, except bubbles and debt?

You can hide, nuke, bury, transform or lie about toxic assets all you want, but Wall St doesn't create any real wealth itself. All it does is impose a kind of top-down seignorage, demanding that all national and international business strategy should be run for its own immediate financial benefit.

Wall St could do some good by offering high quality social investment to implement government strategy. But to an ideologue like Geithner that seems to be literally unthinkable.

So the irony is that while Geithner doesn't believe that governments should tell private business what to do, banks and finance don't share the same reticence when it comes to influence.

And so far it seems that Geithner's is more about protecting that model of influence at almost any price than challenging it.