Latest Economic Threat: Optimism
While explaining his bank-bailout plan before Congress recently, Treasury Secretary Tim Geithner fielded a skeptical question: “What’s the backup plan?” asked one member of Congress. “If everything fails, what do we do?”
“This plan will work,” Geithner answered. “We just need to keep at it.”
Here’s one way to interpret that: There is no backup plan. If everything fails, we’ll be stuck in a financial quagmire for years.
But Tim Geithner is an optimist, and for the moment he’s riding a minor swell of optimism over the economy. In a recent New York Times poll, just 34 percent of respondents felt the economy is getting worse, down from 54 percent in December. In January, just 7 percent of people thought the economy was getting better. Now it’s 20 percent.
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