Do you remember the line in “The Right Stuff”, Tom Wolfe’s book about Chuck Yeager, when one of the pilots remarks to Sam Shephard who played Yeager that Gus Grissom had “screwed the pooch when his capsule sank?” Shephard looked at him and said, “I guess that some pooches can’t be screwed.” That’s what I thought about when I saw this onBloomberg.

Former Securities and Exchange Commission member Annette Nazareth is the leading candidate to become deputy U.S. Treasury secretary, according to people familiar with the matter. 

Before becoming a commissioner in 2005, Nazareth ran the SEC division of market regulation, which oversees brokerage firms, market surveillance and stock exchanges. She led the unit in 2004 when it designed a program to monitor whether Wall Street’s five biggest securities firms had adequate capital and liquidity.

SEC Inspector General David Kotzfaulted the program in a September report, saying the SEC failed to respond to “numerous, potential red flags” at Bear Stearns Cos., such as the firm’s excessive borrowing and over-concentration in mortgage securities.

Then SEC Chairman Christopher Coxscrapped the so-called consolidated supervised entities program the same day Kotz issued his report. It followed the collapse of Bear Stearns and Lehman Brothers Holdings Inc.

With this kind of help, Geithner should have us out of this mess in no time at all.