Geithner: One Day Does Not Make Success

Treasury Secretary Tim Geithner cautioned today that, despite the Dow soaring nearly 500 points after the administration announced its plan to get bad assets off of banks' balance sheets, it is far too soon to call the plan a success.

Treasury Secretary Tim Geithner, shown in this March 16, 2009, file photo, said Monday, March 23, 2009, that despite the Dow's 500-point jump, it was too early to call the Obama administration's bad asset plan a success.

(PAUL J. RICHARDS/AFP/Getty Images)

"So let's talk about what you announced today," the Wall Street Journal's Alan Murray asked Geithner at the Journal's Future of Finance Initiative. "The stock market liked it."

"One day does not make a plan successful," Geithner replied.

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In a wide-ranging question-and-answer session this evening, Geithner described the challenge of coming up with popular financial programs at a time when people nationwide are outraged by the current crisis.

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"Look, we're going through an enormously difficult, complicated financial crisis," he said. "The politics are understandably terribly difficult. People across the country are angry and -- as they should be -- that this economy, the United States of America, got itself in a position where enormous damage has been done as a consequence of a long period of excess risk-taking without meaningful adult supervision.

"And the consequences of that are tragic, because they're basically fundamentally unfair, because people who were careful and responsible, conservative in their decisions, are suffering a lot from the consequences of mistakes they were not part of," he said. "And so you start with a deep sense of public outrage and frustration and some enormously complicated problems."

Even in the face of such public discontent, Geithner outlined how Treasury's latest program, on the heels of other efforts, such as the stress tests for banks, will start thawing out the frozen credit markets.

"We believe we have to provide very substantial forms of financing to help get those markets going again," he said. "This is the next piece of a series of efforts to try to bring that about."

With attractive financing and the promise to match private sector investments side-by-side, Geithner believes Treasury's plan will create a market for banks to offload their bad assets.