Geithner’s Plan Coming Today
Stay close to your computer / tv screen this morning, Secretary of the Treasury Timothy Geithner is to start his briefing this morning at 8:45 EST on his plan to attack the current economic crisis. In today’s Wall Street Journal, Geithner begins to give out some of the details of this much-anticipated plan.
What I find particularly interesting in this op-ed is Geithner’s immediate recognition of the depth of the public’s deep dissatisfaction with our current bank bailouts:
The depth of public anger and the gravity of this crisis require that every policy we take be held to the most serious test: whether it gets our financial system back to the business of providing credit to working families and viable businesses, and helps prevent future crises.
Back when we first starting handing over billions in cash to the banks, the argument that these banks were needed for our economy to function, that without credit our economy literally freezes, was fairly strong. It took some convincing, but the public understood the gravity of the situation. Fast forward six months: we’ve poured many tens of billions more into these same companies, and instead of unfreezing the markets, the economy seems to be getting worse. And the icing on the cake, of course, are the fat “retention” bonuses pulled in by execs at these very same banks. Obviously we are no longer dealing with reasoned logic in the general public, but anger and frustration. It is hard to imagine any positive legistlation coming out of those emotions.
[UPDATE] Details on the plan at the WSJ, NYTimes, Clusterstock, and the Treasury itself.
