Treasury Secretary Tim Geithner was under a great deal of stress.
As he announced the Obama administration's financial bailout plan Tuesday, he pivoted mechanically so that he could read each word from teleprompter screens, creating the unsettling impression that he was addressing his remarks to the walls on his left and his right rather than the audience in front of him.
When he got to the primary element of his plan, his voice cracked on the word "first."
Why so much stress? Well, for weeks, Congress, the markets and the country have been waiting to hear the details of the plan. But Geithner had few details to offer. Instead, at the heart of his plan, he proposed a stress test.
"First, we're going to require banking institutions to go through a carefully designed, comprehensive stress test," he announced. "This borrows the medical term."
The medical clarification was probably unnecessary. The real question was why he would propose a stress test when other medical procedures seem to be in order for the banking system – an enema at the very least, if not a heart-lung transplant.
The stress-test prescription failed to cure the market's anxiety; the Dow fell 382 points Tuesday, and investors blamed Geithner's lack of specifics. On the positive side, he added a new buzzword to the lexicon of the economic debate. After weeks of talking about "shovel-ready" projects, Washington can now talk about stress tests.
In truth, it would be medically suspicious if Geithner and the administration weren't stressed out. Inherent in the proposal is an admission that the feds still don't have a handle on how weak the banking system is, and a fear that things could deteriorate further.
And what if a bank fails its stress test? "I don't think there's a pass/fail on the stress test," said a Treasury Department official.
Geithner, meanwhile, was undergoing a stress test of his own. "Is there a concrete plan here?" fumed Sen. Richard Shelby of Alabama, the banking committee's ranking Republican. "Aggravating economic problems by contributing to marketplace uncertainty about what steps the government will take – is this what this is?"
As Geithner defended his plan, the ticker tape on Wall Street resembled the electrocardiogram of a very sick patient.
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