Tuesday, February 10, 2009

Geithner's Financial Stability Plan

This morning the new plan to rescue the financial system was unveiled by Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner, but so far the markets have not reacted very positively to the news. It is still early, but it appears investors are not sold on the proposed government actions. In his speech Geithner threw around numbers as high as $1 tillion, which represents the expansion of a key Federal Reserve lending program, according to the Associated Press. But even that failed to impress investors. Kathy Lien talks more about the new rescue plan and the impact to currency and financial markets in her blog post below.

The Treasury Secretary has finally spoken and the markets are disappointed!

The price action in the currency markets suggests that investors are disappointed by the lack of details from the Treasury’s new Financial Stability Plan and are skeptical about the effectiveness of getting the private sector involved. Furthermore, investors are not happy about being apart of an experiment (although I think this is the only way to go because all of the old measures have proven effective).

Geithner announced a cocktail of initiatives using “things we haven’t tried before” and warned “that we will make mistakes.” If the Treasury Secretary is not 100 percent confident in his own plan, how could investors be?

Traders have plowed right back into the US dollar on the fear that the US government is rolling the dice once again. Equities have also fallen as much as 300 points.

The Treasury’s Super TARP plan, which is now renamed as the Financial Stability Plan has 3 core components:

1. More Capital for Healthy Banks

2. New Financing for as Much as $1 trillion of Consumer and Business loans

3. Public Financing for Private Investors Willing to Buy Distressed Debt (details of private/public investment fund have not been released)

Read the rest of this analysis on FX360.com

This post can also be viewed on kathylien.com.

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