Congressman Baca asked Ben Bernanke a very simple question about AIG: “When was it broken?” That question has a very simple answer: “1999.” But Bernanke didn’t want to admit that the deregulation passed in 1999 brought about the mess at AIG and elsewhere.

If you missed Jonathan Turley on Rachel last night, here’s you chance to see it. It is one of his best laid out explanations of why President Obama needs to get out of the way and allow an investigation into war crimes go forward.

Last week, the arrival of Matt Taibbi’s perfectly-timed article on AIG in Rolling Stone let us all know in plain but elegant language just how royally fucked we were:

By early 2009, a whole series of new government operations had been invented to inject cash into the economy, most all of them completely secretive and with names you’ve never heard of.

Arlen Specter crawls to Grover Norquist and says he won’t vote for cloture on Employee Free Choice. As bankers gleefully rub their hands at the prospect of their trillion dollar gift from Timothy Geithner with no limits on what they can pay themselves, the one thing that might have made a tiny dent in the huge transfer of wealth taking place in this country is tabled — for now.

The main cause of there being too many people for them to deal with was that there were too many people?

. . . no one could have possibly foreseen. . .

What value do private investors offer to justify the enormous returns they want? Not much. Not enough to suit me.

But where were they when faculty members of the theology department at Boston College protested the announcement that BC was awarding Condoleeza Rice an honorary degree?

I am told by someone close to Barney Frank that the details of the public-private partnership plan are still very murky, I get the sense mechanics will not be discussed.

The comments get geeky, but you might have a look at this post (problem is someone will need to brief questioner a bit on retort).

Hearing is on CSPAN3 and the committee thread. In addition to Geithner and Bernanke, the head of the NY Fed, William Dudley, is also here.

For my liveblog on the statements, see post below (it’s mostly an excerpt of their statements).

Treasury Secretary Tim Geithner and Fed Chair Ben Bernanke will testify before the House Financial Services Committee today on AIG. Geithner is expected to ask for more power and an ineffectual systemic risk regulator as an answer to the AIG problem (for why that’s unlikely to work, see Bill Black’s chat from yesterday).