David Brooks replays geithner:

But the big uncertainty is not inside the banks; it’s in the broader economic climate.
“People are enormously uncertain about the depth of the recession,” Geithner says. “They’re enormously uncertain” about how their assets will perform in this environment. But this is not like the savings-and-loan crisis of the ’80s and ’90s, or like Sweden, where banks themselves were dead, he said, adding that we’re trying to repair “a system that is largely alive and will largely survive but is still burdened by systemic market failure, systemic uncertainty.”

What neither Brooks nor geithner acknowledge is that this failed market is not the free market of myth. Rather, it is a market built by government and poorly repaired many times over by government.

Continuing to mess with what they do not understand will continue to have consequences that are not pretty.