The heat’s on Geithner — under pressure, understaffed, and in need of an image makeover. – Ilene 
Tim Geithner, American Chameleon
Courtesy of StockJockey at 1440 Wall Street
Inside the Beltway political obstacles are a fact of life, but the gauntlet Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner is running might be the ultimate obstacle course. Although we continue to hear vague references to his coming "plan", a week has passed with Tim incommunicado.
Geithner’s "bad bank" proposal was scaled back after getting push back from Obama’s inner circle, which led him to replace it with an expanded, near-trillion dollar TALF plan. And make no mistake about it – everything is hung up because of ideological battles behind the scenes. Overpaying bankers for lousy assets on their balance sheet (bad bank) died a quick death – 
Obama’s attacks on Wall Street from nearly Day One made that course a given. But opposition to selective bank nationalizations have now melted like snowcones in August – and we have even coined a new phrase for what is coming,"pre-privatization".
Cute, isn’t it? At least semantics are making the great leap forward.
But none of this does Tim Geithner much good. He is woefully understaffed at the moment, very nearly a one-man show until his under secretaries get on board and roll up their sleeves. And it would seem that a great deal of his time of late is being used to recast his image in Washington from a silver spoon child of privilege to a more blue collar kind of guy in favor with Team Obama. It remains to be seen if he can hide his Larchmont lockjaw.
As part of a crew (Rubin, Summers, Gensler) who deserve a hand for landing us in this mess, Geithner is doing his best to put some distance between him and the ghost of Hank Paulson, who played a major role in Geithner’s recent life. Geithner is changing his stripes alright, as Nina Jane Easton of Fortune Magazine pointed out last night on the Charlie Rose show.
Nearly every high profile Republican is now on the record as opposing anything TARPy, while Obama zig-zagged and threw Main Street a bone with his foreclosure mitigation plan. 
For all the gory details, including how Geithner is now “deeply offended” by what went down on Wall Street, and how he is portraying himself as a public servant, as opposed to a Hank Paulson, check out the video from Charlie Rose last night. It includes an appearance from a somewhat detached Nouriel Roubini, who was perhaps brooding given a flat stock market on Wednesday.
Flat is the new down.
At least the way Dr. Doom’s views it on his sheets.
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The dirt on Geither gets heavy at 21:40, but watch the whole thing if you have time, including Roubini’s 4 or 5 talking points that follow Eastons remarks on Geithner around the 23 minute mark.
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Update:
Perhaps Geithner will listen to PIMCO, who seem to have a solution for everything that ails us:
….the essential game plan is clear: use the power of the Fed, the FDIC and the Treasury to create government-sponsored shadow banks, such as the Term Asset-Backed Securities Lending Facility (the TALF) and the Public-Private Investment Fund (the P-PIF).
The formula? Take a small dollop of the Treasury’s free-to-spend taxpayer money (there is still $350 billion left) to serve as the equity in a government sponsored shadow bank, and then lever the daylights out of it with loans from the Federal Reserve, funded with the printing press. That’s the formula for the TALF, to provide leverage, with no recourse after a haircut, to restart the securitization markets.
The same formula applies for the P-PIF, with the addition of FDIC stop out loss protection for dodgy bank assets that private sector players might buy. With such goodies, such players, it is hoped, will be able to pay a sufficiently high price for those assets to avoid bankrupting the seller bank.
Unfortunately, Secretary Geithner hasn’t laid out the precise parameters of how to mix these three ingredients, which is driving the markets up the wall. But make no mistake, these are the ingredients, along with continued direct capital infusions into banks where necessary.
Uncle Sam has the ability to substitute itself – not himself or herself! – for the broken conventional bank system, levering up and risking up as the conventional banking system does the exact opposite.
Yes, there will be subsidies involved, sometimes huge ones. And yes, the process will seem arbitrary and capricious at times, reeking of inequities. Such is the nature of government rescue schemes for broken banking systems, while maintaining them as privately owned.
Saving Capitalistic Banking From Itself
Pimco
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Tim’s First Hire
Nazareth Said to Be Leading Candidate for Deputy Treasury Chief
Bloomberg
