Gibbs: A One-Day Market Slide Means Little
White House Press Secretary Roberts Gibbs defended President Obama and Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner during his press briefing this afternoon. Pressed on the stock market's dramatic fall following Geithner's comments yesterday on the administration's economic policy (ADD LINK), Gibbs dismissed the significance of the market's slide.
Added Gibbs: "I think we can all go back in -- in both recent and not-so-recent history and see that one-day announcements have provided positive changes in the market for plans that ultimately turned out to be unsuccessful, just as negative reactions have sometimes been at the forefront of plans that worked."
Gibbs argued that "the plan that the secretary outlined is not designed, though, to take care of the market for one day" before launching into broad praise of the plan.
"Some of that market reaction may be based on what the plan does do. Right? I'm sure many in the banking sector had hoped, presumably, that bad assets would be paid for either in an unreasonable way or at an unreasonable value," he reasoned.
The new White House spokesman then argued that the story was more of a media creation than a legitimate market reaction to the administration's announcement.
"I've counseled many times in my very brief tenure standing up here not to always judge leaks in the newspaper as fact. I have no doubt that what some people read in the newspaper charged their excitement and expectations up about something that wasn't ultimately in a plan," he said.
Gibbs was then asked, "Do you feel that -- do you feel that it was ready? Was the plan ready? Does the president feel it was ready? And number two, if so, is he pleased with how it was communicated yesterday and how it was rolled out?"
"I just hesitate to judge the breadth of this and the comprehensiveness of this based on one day's reaction," Gibbs responded.
"I think if you look through this, you'll find -- you'll undoubtedly find, as I said, some disappointment by people that had hoped that there would be some large, big bank announced that would take up in one fell swoop everything that had been wrong with the system over the course of several years and wipe it away overnight," he added.