White House defends Geithner’s bailout plan

The White House said Wednesday that Treasury
Secretary Timothy Geithner’s plan for the second round of last year’s TARP
money contained plenty of details and should not be judged harshly because it
sent markets spiraling after it was announced Tuesday.

White House press secretary Robert Gibbs said that Geithner’s plan, which was
blasted on Wall Street for what it was missing in terms of details, was
“not designed to take care of the market for one day.”

{mosads}”I think there’s a tendency to look at simply one measurement of this, and
by and large that measurement was a few stock markets,” Gibbs said.

Gibbs said the only measurement that matters is whether the plan will help
“the long term economic health of America.”

“I think we can all go back in both recent and not-so-recent history and
see that one-day announcements have provided positive changes in the market for
plans that ultimately turned out to be unsuccessful, just as negative reactions
have sometimes been at the forefront of plans that worked,” he said.

While warning that “there are going to be twists and turns in all of
this,” Gibbs said that critics of the plan had missed the larger point
that the new plan for distributing the bailout money is predicated on
transparency, something he said was missing from the first installment.

“It’s based on transparency and integrity, through a comprehensive scrub
of the financial system and a rigorous evaluation of the need in the financial
system,” he said.