Our poor Treasury secretary:
But even as he maintains a frenetic pace — unveiling plans, testifying before Congress and negotiating new bailouts with the likes of Citigroup, General Motors and the American International Group — there are signs that events are getting ahead of him.
Administration officials say they are postponing their plan to produce a detailed road map for overhauling the nation’s financial regulatory system by April, in time for the Group of 20 meeting in London. Though officials say they will still develop basic principles in time for the meeting, the plan will not include much detail.
AdvertisementTreasury officials are also still scrambling to decide details of their plan to buy up as much as $1 trillion in toxic assets from the nation’s banks, one month after being widely criticized for presenting a plan that lacked any specifics on how it would work.
Analysts say it is far too early to know if Mr. Geithner and his team will be effective.
Overworked, undertaxedpaid. If I went in for conspiracy theories, I’d have to wonder if Geithner is supposed to fail. He’s got no senior help, thanks to a “broken” vetting process, and no plan, thanks to… uh… well, I don’t honestly know why someone in his position and with his experience has no plan. Which brings us back to the conspiracy theory: The less Geithner accomplishes, the more of a crisis President Obama and Rahm Emanuel have to take advantage of.
Perhaps they’re trying to see how quickly the economy can be made to bottom out. The fast it happens, the more it can be blamed on Bush.
The problem here is Heinlein’s Razor: never blame on malice what can be explained by stupidity. In this case, it would seem that this couldn’t possibly be the result of simple incompetence, and so much be malice; the counter-argument is that it would be hard to find such a concentrated pool of incompetence anywhere outside of government.
It’s a pretty problem.