Geithner's Empty Speech

Geithner was thin on specifics for a reason. Drum is puzzled:

Say what?  After nearly two years of crisis and weeks of work, they suddenly discovered that buying up toxic assets from banks was problematic because the assets were expensive, hard to value, and risky for taxpayers?  That's not exactly rocket science.  Hell, someone who had only casually browsed through the blogosphere over the past year would know that.  And not even the financial blogosphere.  Just ordinary lay blogs like this one.

Beutler infers:

Senior members of the Obama administration want Geithner to have ownership of this plan and they're setting him up to take the fall if it fails.

Krugman gloats:

I can’t believe that the discussions would have gone so off the rails if any of the high-visibility outsiders had been in the loop Joe Stiglitz, Nouriel Roubini, Simon Johnson, etc. (No, I wasn’t in the loop either.) So what the WaPo report seems to suggest is a worrisome insularity. Geithner and Summers are smart guys but they need to get out more.