Ass Covering: Secretary of the Treasury Edition

So, now that there are an increasing number of people calling for his scalp, Timothy "Eddie Haskell" Geithner is talking tough about the banks:

Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner disputed claims by Goldman Sachs Group Inc. executives that the bank could have survived the financial crisis without government help and said it and other Wall Street firms should show some restraint in handing out bonuses this year.

“It is very important that we change the way these executives are paid, the form of compensation, this year,” Geithner said in an interview yesterday for Bloomberg Television’s “Political Capital with Al Hunt,” which is being aired throughout the weekend. “We have to end that era of irresponsibly high bonuses.”

So, the guy who, until now, said very little about bank pay, and:

• Continued to support front-running via high-frequency trading
• Supported naked naked credit default swaps (CDS) despite the fact that this sort of insurance were banned 367 years ago because of the danger they posed to the economy.
• Tried to get Sheila Bair fired

Now he's saying that none of the banks were solvent, and that they all survived only through government largess, and that they are overpaying their staff.

This is all about the calls to can him getting louder, not any "road to Damascus" moment.