Geithner: From Indispensable to Indecipherable

Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner has gone from being the Indispensable Man to Indecipherable Man. With global financial community watching closely, Geithner laid out a confusing rescue plan for the U.S. banking system that did little to stem the ongoing dissipation of investor confidence.

The reaction from Wall Street was withering. "The bottom line from the Geithner speech is that it was too general, and it lacked the specifics needed to it to be credible," opined economist Brian Bethune of IHS Global Insight. Like many, economist Robert Brusca was perplexed about the plan to purchase toxic mortgage assets through some sort of sketchy public-partnership: "It is still not clear how this will work and how much cushion public money will provide and if it will involve any guarantees. I do not begin to understand how this private/public plan will work. Moreover, Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac failed precisely because of their public-private identity crisis." Little wonder why stocks plunged and investors rushed to buy safe U.S. Treasuries.

Where was Geithner the Technocrat when you needed him? Because that is just what the markets need right now: a detailed, technocratic explanation of the way forward. This might have been the clincher as far as investors are concerned: "We are exploring a range of different structures for this program, and will seek input from market participants and the public as we design it." In other words, "We have have concrete and high detailed plan to develop a concrete and highly detailed plan. We'll get back to you."

Oh, and it would be nice if he could do all that without painting such an unremittingly bleak picture of the economy. But more important is to change the mark-to-market accounting rules that are needlessly driving the financial system into the ground. Former FDIC Chairman William Issac has told the Securities and Exchange Commission that every money center bank in the 1980s would have gone bust had they been forced to sharply write down the value Latin American debt: "If we had followed today's approach during the 1980s, we would have nationalized nearly all of the largest banks in this country and thousands of additional banks and thrifts would have failed. I have little doubt that the country would have gone from a serious recession into a depression." Sound familiar?

And along with that change, how about embracing the private sector as the surest path back to prosperity? Cut corporate taxes. Suspend capital gains taxes. Indeed, one reason why Geithner may have been so vague about the bank rescue plan is that ultimately the plan may entail such high government borrowing that announcing it now would have derailed the current $800 billion Obama stimulus plan.