The COP said there was a problem with vagueness. Former IMF officials raised the same concerns.

What's worse than a financial crisis that is out of control? A government that still doesn't understand the problem and waves it's hands.

Change, the old way.

COP: What Is Treasury's Strategy?

15 of 65: Defining the problem to be addressed is essential to designing an effective strategy. If Treasury sees the core problem as inadequate bank capital in relation to bank obligations, certain strategies to address that problem will follow. On the other hand, if Treasury sees the problem as unclear asset valuation, consumer caution, or accounting failures, other strategies would follow. Treasury has still not explained precisely what it sees as the problem.

Treasury's Geithner announced a "plan" for the still-not-defined problem:

To increase transparency and accountability to protect taxpayers, Treasury will:

- launch a new website, FinancialStability.gov, to detail where federal funds are going and whether they are succeeding in stabilizing the financial system and promoting new lending, including posting all contracts on the Internet.

However, Treasury at the website did not define the problem:

FinancialStability: To address the financial crisis, the Financial Stability Plan is designed to attack our credit crisis on all fronts with our full arsenal of financial tools and the resources commensurate to the depth of the problem.

More vagueness raising questions whether the US will have a new government before the lessons of TARP are applied.

Not much assurance this can be avoided:

Geithner: "As costly as this effort may be, we know that the cost of a complete collapse of our financial system would be incalculable for families, for businesses and for our nation."

We learned from the Asian, Argentinian, and Russian financial crises that an undesirable outcome does not mean that outcome is prevented.

Bush said we were fighting terror, but embraced torture. Who's ready for feudalism?