That overcheduling an be a eal itch

Take cover! The "Tyranny of S" has resumed.

You guys are brutal.

But I'm hopping on the bandwagon anyway. If Obama had deviated from the chedule, would the post about the "eeming lack of disclipline in the White House" have been far behind?

Working with deadline pressure brings out the best, and worst, of people. As a dedicated reporter, you should realize that more than most, Mr. Cooper.

And Geithner, while he's obviously had other things to worry about, was given primary responsibity for figuring out what to do with the second $350B TARP money from when he was nominated shortly after the election in November. Finally, one of the selling points for his nomination was that he had worked with Paulson as head of the NY Fed on the frist half bailout. So he has had since last September to figure this out.

If he wasn't prepared in the weeks and months he had to figure this out, then maybe someone else should try.

Rolling out an incomplete plan was stupid. Really stupid. It plays up the criticism that Obama and Geithner are too green to manage the crisis. The fact is that Geithner is stalling having to bring out the hammer and nationalize banks.

Japan's GDP dropped over 12%. They are the third most powerful buyer nation in the world. They buy crap... a lot of it. And they hold dollars... a lot of them. The interdependency of the world economy on a the foolish idea of gambling on artifical odds using workers' retirements is going to create a crash whose seismic impact will be felt for a generation. I hope they suck on it. If Geithner can't man up and hand pink slips to his foolish criminal buddies, then he needs to go home. Hire me... I would have no problem kicking them in the teeth and starting over.

I know we all tend to be US-centric on debating the politics of scheduling, but the tyranny of the schedule doesn't appear to be some Obama-team obsession with sticking to a pre-arranged game plan. It was Geithner's trip to Rome.

He had to have something out there before his trip. Otherwise every question in Rome from the press would have been "what's the plan Stan". And every sentence he uttered -- or the other finance ministers uttered -- would have been scoured by the markets for hints of what would be in the Treasury plan.

His announcement of the basic concepts around which his plan is to be designed served as a placeholder so he could engage in discussions with his counterparts in Rome without those discussions being a source of constant market destabilization.

People seem to forget, when critiquing either Paulson or Geithner, that there's no bright line between the "US banking system" and the "global banking system." With the European banks looking to be in even more trouble than the big US banks (collapse of Eastern European currencies, anyone?), any Treasury plan must take into account potential contagion and how financial institutions with cross-border operations might "game" any system set up on one side of the Atlantic or the other. So he has to take into account what the others are likely to do -- or more to the point, what they're likely not to be able to do, in the face of continuing deterioration of their financial institutions.

So I'll cut Geithner a lot of slack about the scheduling.

But I am disheartened that Treasury was at this late date still exploring ways to price toxic assets -- that's been an obvious non-starter since the day after the "details" of Tarp 1 emerged. No technical mechanism is going to arrive at a Goldilocks price that is high enough for the banks to be willing to sell but doesn't represent a huge taxpayer-funded backdoor recapitalization for the benefit of the banks' shareholders. Hopefully, the "stress test" phase will produce a triage of the US banks which we've needed to do -- openly, not in a dark basement of Tarp or the FDIC -- so we can send some to the morgue, put others in the hopsital, and give a fairly reliable "certificate of good health" to the rest.