I was a bit skeptical about the appointment of Timothy Geithner as Secretary of the Treasury, given that he was President of the New York Fed when all the crazy derivatives were being leveraged onto the balance sheets of the banks for most of the decade.  I am of the opinion that no one from Wall Street should be allowed inside the Beltway, let alone within the corridors of power after the debacle they helped create.

One of the reasons - well, perhaps the main reason - why stocks have lost nearly 10% over the past five trading days is because the market was led to believe that the Obama administration was about to unveil a real solution to the problem.  However, when it became apparent that Geithner and company were seemingly as rudderless as Paulson, the market sold off hard.

The Washington Post has uncovered why Geithner appeared to not have a plan to deal with the financial crisis at his press conference last Tuesday.  It is because he did not have a plan to deal with the financial crisis at his press conference last Tuesday.

Just days before Treasury Secretary Timothy F. Geithner was scheduled to lay out his much-anticipated plan to deal with the toxic assets imperiling the financial system, he and his team made a sudden about-face.

According to several sources involved in the deliberations, Geithner had come to the conclusion that the strategies he and his team had spent weeks working on were too expensive, too complex and too risky for taxpayers.

They needed an alternative and found it in a previously considered initiative to pair private investments and public loans to try to buy the risky assets and take them off the books of banks. There was one problem: They didn't have enough time to work out many details or consult with others before the plan was supposed to be unveiled.

You would think that as head of the most important Federal Reserve Bank, after 18 months into the crisis he would have at least some idea on how to deal with all this.

The bears are banging down the market because they believe the government is either unwilling or unable to deal with the problem.  So far, the government has given little indication that the bears are wrong.