Fannie Mae's Allison to head TARP?

Fannie Mae CEO Herb Allison is likely to take over from Neel Kashkari, the former Goldman Sachs Group (GS) banker who brought his shiny pate to Congress to get kicked in another part of his anatomy for his handling of the Troubled Asset Relief Program (TARP). If approved, Allison's formal title will be Assistant Secretary for the Office of Financial Stability, which administers TARP. Under former Treasury Secretary Hank Paulson, TARP went from being a way to buy toxic assets to a source of capital for big banks -- whether they wanted it or not.

Now, Treasury Secretary Geithner wants to revive Paulson's original idea to the tune of a deeply flawed $1 trillion program to further enrich a handful of billionaire hedge fund and private equity honchos. And Geithner appears to have selected a very cold fish for that job -- a Yale philosophy major and Stanford MBA who lost out on the CEO's chair at Merrill Lynch a decade ago to the far more stock-broker-friendly David Komansky.