Day 20
Feb. 8, 2009
"Yes, there will be support for struggling banks, the credit markets more generally, and support and pressure to assure these needless foreclosures are confined."
—Larry Summers, Obama economic aide, on ABC's This Week, announcing that Obama's TARP plan is coming soon
The President's Director of the National Economic Council breaks some news on the Sunday talk-show circuit with an announcement that Treasury Secretary Geithner will be pushing back the unveiling of his bank-bailout plan to the coming Tuesday instead of Monday. Summers tells ABC News that Obama wants to keep the focus on the stimulus Monday before moving on to the matter of how the Administration will spend the remaining $350 billion in TARP funds.
But the move from Monday to Tuesday may be for different reasons — a subsequent Washington Post story reports that the Treasury Department made major last-minute changes to the plan, resulting in the delay. Two days later, Geithner stumbles while laying out the details of a vague agenda to fix the financial system, causing stock markets to tumble amid concerns that the Obama Administration does not have a handle on how to solve the toxic-assets problem.