Geithner's Speech

Much of what the treasury secretary said sounded good, but without concrete details and an unfortunate preponderance of the phrase "in the coming weeks" it's hard to say how good the proposals really are.

I did note one rather depressing statement on Geithner's part. Towards the end he goes on for a bit, talking about how there will stops and starts in the progress of repairing the financial system. That there will be experimentation and times when ideas fail and need to be jettisoned.

What he didn't say, but what's pretty clear from reading between the lines, is that the Obama Administration expects this crisis to stick with us for quite some time.

So yeah, we should probably start thinking of a name for what we're going to call this thing we're going to be living in. Great Depression 2 isn't very evocative. Whatever we do end up calling it, it's likely to be the central aspect of all of our lives for the next few years.

Personally, I'm most interested in how the financial system is going to be reformed. Regardless of how well we manage to arrest the crisis, we cannot have true long term recovery without making sure that the systemic flaws inherent in the old system are repaired.