Wall Street Cheers Geithner

Will this quiet the Tim Geithner haters? Stock markets are bear-hugging the treasury secretary’s toxic asset plan, with the Dow leaping 497.47 points, or 6.84 percent, in late trading to close at 7,775.86, and the S&P and Nasdaq climbing 7 percent. All 30 of the Dow’s 30 components were up, and Alcoa, American Express, Bank of America, Citigroup, and JPMorgan Chase posted double-digit percentage gains after details of Geithner’s plan were announced. The Treasury Department announced this morning that a new public-private partnership could purchase $1 trillion in bad credit bets from banks. “The [stock] market was looking for anything that was more definitive from Treasury than what we had,” Bud Haslett, chief executive of Miller Tabak Capital Management, tells The Wall Street Journal. “There are still are lot of unknowns, but it is more clear. The market is going to have a positive bias going forward.”