The stock market's rocky ride today, stoked by senior Democratic senators appearing to foreshadow bank nationalization, prompted White House spokesman Robert Gibbs to re-assert the government's lack of interest in financial takeovers.

"This administration continues to strongly believe that a privately held banking system is the correct way to go," Gibbs told reporters today.

The market proceeded to rebound slightly before closing lower, with the Dow 100 points down. Was Wall Street indicating skepticism about Gibbs' intentions? Not to Scott Talbott, chief lobbyist for the Financial Services Roundtable, which represents the market's biggest players in Washington.

Talbott is strongly opposed to and unconcerned about nationalization -- but he pointed out that the term remains undefined in the public discourse. "There are two ways to do this," he told me.

One option is the type of short-term federal takeover that occurred at IndyMac. Talbott distinguished that type of government role in the "orderly dissolution of a failed institution" from the feds "owning a controlling interest in the institution" -- the sort of nationalization that spooks Wall Street.

When I asked if major banks could support setting broad guidelines on when and how government should step in to aid banks, Talbott demurred. "The challenge is to balance the public's interest [in] knowing where their tax dollars are going and the risk of creating a self-fulfilling prophecy," he said. "If the hypothetical standard is that all institutions with a capital ratio below X will be taken over by the government, you've doomed those institutions.

Talbott's emphasis on "protecting" data on failing banks to avoid a run on them is often cited by critics of nationalization to defend the ad hoc bank-mending policy that the Bush Treasury Department used during the early days of the bailout. (Any similarity between "protecting" bank info and the "private" timetable for Iraq withdrawal once backed by Mitt Romney, which would supposedly avoid a spike in terrorist activity, is purely coincidental.)

Tim Geithner's Treasury team is expected to provide more details next week on its banking rescue strategies, including the much-discussed "stress tests" to determine bank solvency. Talbott said the "stress tests" are likely to be modeled on CAMELs ratings, the private regulatory assessments of bank health that examine five factors: Capital adequacy, Asset quality, Management, Earnings, and Liquidity.