Word: geithners
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...ugly, but it's true: when a Washington power player looks set to fall, the capital drools. So Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner found himself the object of intense interest when he went before the House Ways and Means Committee to testify on Tuesday. It was his first major public appearance since his less than inspiring rollout on Feb. 10 of a half-baked plan to save banks that left Washington and Wall Street whispering that Geithner, 47, wasn't ready for prime time...
...while Washington's public humiliations often hang on mere misdemeanors of a sexual, financial or chemical nature, the economy depends on Geithner's ability to restore confidence, as President Barack Obama argued in a prime-time press conference on Feb. 9. "My instruction to [Geithner] has been, Let's get this right. Let's create a template in which we're restoring market confidence," he said, later adding, "Ultimately, the government cannot substitute for all the private capital that has been withdrawn from the system. We've got to restore confidence so that private capital goes back...
...Geithner do on Tuesday? To judge by the stock market, which dropped 4% in the wake of his Feb. 10 speech and has largely stayed on its downward trajectory since then, he survived. The Dow rallied from a 13-year low just before he began testifying to a modest gain afterward, then finished the day down again, but by just under 40 points and well off its lows. So much for Florida Republican Ginny Brown-Waite's assertion that every time Geithner speaks in public, "the stock market plummets...
...Washington's conviction that perception is reality, Geithner's fate rests less on how he performs in public than on how his plans fare: the market and most Americans care a lot more about the substance of the Administration's efforts to save the economy than they do about Geithner's thin delivery. Sure, he doesn't seem to fill his suit, and he talks too quickly, and he swallows the ends of his sentences, and he gives the impression of a grad student taking an oral exam, not someone leading the country out of perdition...
...standard banks are judged by. In a panic, markets for certain assets simply stop functioning, and relying on the market to determine the health of banks means succumbing to panic. Then again, relying on bank execs to price their assets is no good either. Treasury Secretary Tim Geithner hopes to get around this by jump-starting a market for troubled mortgage securities, but he hasn't outlined how he's going to do that. So for the moment, we're stuck with more judgment calls. And guesses...