After the speech, time for a drink

I might have more confidence in Treasury Secretary Tim Geithner if he looked like he could order a drink without getting carded. And he definitely is going to need a drink or two in the months ahead. We all will.

And that is because financiers on Wall Street have been drunk for years. Drunk on power. Drunk on ego. Drunk on greed.

And now we must reward them for it. That is the essential message of Geithner, his boss Barack Obama and their financial bailout plan.

It is like the old joke: When you owe the bank $100,000, you are in trouble. When you owe the bank $100 million, the bank is in trouble.

Today, the banks owe trillions of dollars, and the world is in trouble.

At his speech Tuesday in an ornate, gilded room at the Treasury Department, Geithner said: "Investors and bankers took risks they did not understand. Even institutions that were overseen by a complicated and overlapping system of regulators put themselves in extreme jeopardy."

Actually, they put us in extreme jeopardy, because now we have to pull their fat from the fire. As both Geithner and Obama have made clear, there is no way out of this crisis without rewarding the bad behavior of those who caused the crisis.

This is how Obama put it at a town meeting in Fort Myers, Fla., on Tuesday: "You've got a guy making $20 million a year and ran his bank into the ground, and now we've got to clean up his mess. That makes you mad."

No, that does not make me mad. It makes me insane.

We could let these banks go under, and some economists think we should. But the Obama administration is rejecting that path, opting for a bailout instead.

"When our government provides support to banks, it is not for the benefit of banks, it is for the businesses and families who depend on banks," Geithner said in his speech.

"I want to be candid: This strategy will cost money, involve risk and take time."

"We will make mistakes," he added. "We will go through periods where things get worse and progress gets interrupted."

But some are better insulated against these bad periods than others. Geithner got $434,668 in severance pay from the Federal Reserve Bank of New York when he became treasury secretary. But there was a downside for Geithner: He actually had to pay his back taxes.

Geithner, who is 47 but looks young enough to be driving on a learner's permit, went on CNBC after his speech and did a live interview with Brian Williams.

Williams asked some tough questions, including if it bothered Geithner that the stock market plunged throughout his speech.

"This is an acute, severe and complicated financial crisis," Geithner replied. "We need to be honest and direct. It will require taking risks that markets cannot take. This is what government can do."

"Government" means you and me, by the way. Just in case you were wondering.

The Geithner financial rescue plan, so complicated that he didn't really detail it in his speech, will cost about $1.5 trillion — and that's probably just for starters.

"This is enormously complicated," Geithner said. "There are a million ideas out there."

Actually, I liked the idea of the guy who stood up at Obama's town meeting in Elkhart, Ind., on Monday and said he knew where Obama could send the bailout money.

"Send that check to our mailbox," he said.

To find out more about Roger Simon, and read features by other Creators Syndicate writers and cartoonists, visit the Creators Syndicate Web page at www.creators.com.

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