Martin Wolf shreds TARP 2

"Geithner made a comment toward the end of his Senate testimony that betrayed his fundamental misunderstanding of the crisis. How is his new plan going to get us through our banking morass? He said that by offering more government “financing,” private capital will return to these markets to absorb bad assets. I literally screamed at my television when he said that. Financing?!?! You still think this is a liquidity problem?!!? Assets aren’t being bought because they are over-priced, not because buyers can’t get the money to finance their acquisition. The problem, Mr. Geithner, is insolvency. Asset prices are still far too high, for them to be resolved their prices need to fall. If this wipes out the world’s financial system then so be it. Better we get on with cleaning up the mess than shoving more cheap “financing” into the system only so it can shit out still more toxic assets to be cleaned up later. We’re neck deep in bank excrement already; will the Obama administration wait for us to be totally submerged before it cares to offer details about how it plans to address the problem?"