Geithner to Announce Plan

While all eyes are on the Senate Tuesday as it votes on Obama’s stimulus package, Treasury Secretary Tim Geithner will make some news of his own at 11 a.m. with a plan to spend the rest of Bush’s $700 billion in bailout money (the TARP, if you will). He’s trying to tackle the toxic debt clogging banks’ balance sheets—and he’s planning a new round of injections of taxpayer money into the banks that most need it. Another possibility: creating “a so-called aggregator bank, featuring investors such as hedge funds and private equity, that may issue Federal Deposit Insurance Corp.-backed debt,” to address “the illiquid assets that caused the credit crunch,” Bloomberg reports. According to The New York Times, Geithner can definitely call the plan his own: He succesfully fought off attempts to control how banks spend their money from other Obama advisers, including David Axelrod.