I was underwhelmed from the beginning with President Obama’s choices of Lawrence Summers and Timothy Geithner, and the events of the last couple of weeks have shored up a lot of public opinion that Geithner, in particular, may not have the right vision to shepherd the economy into a genuine recovery. But, for the moment, his plan is all we’ve got.
It doesn’t help that economic heavyweights like Paul Krugman are down on Geithner’s plan, but for now I will take limited solace in the words of economist Brad DeLong:
Q: What if markets never recover, the assets are not fundamentally undervalued, and even when held to maturity the government doesn’t make back its money?
A: Then we have worse things to worry about than government losses on TARP-program money–for we are then in a world in which the only things that have value are bottled water, sewing needles, and ammunition.
In other words, there may be a better plan out there; this plan we have may not work; but if it doesn’t, the reason it won’t is because things are so fundamentally screwed up that probably nothing would have saved us.
Yeah… that, uh, makes me feel… better?
(Found, as usual, on Daring Fireball.)