No Credit: Timothy Geithner’s financial plan is working--and making him very unpopular. 
by John Cassidy

The hardest part of his job, Geithner often says, is getting people to comprehend the inner logic of a financial-rescue operation, and the unpopular actions it entails. In fact, his problem may be not economic illiteracy but its opposite: Americans understand all too well what has happened. Financial crises have a way of revealing aspects of our economic system that otherwise remain obscured, such as the symbiotic relationship between Wall Street and Washington, the hidden subsidies that financial firms sometimes receive from the Fed and other government agencies, and the fact that the vast profits that firms like JPMorgan Chase and Goldman generate depend in part on an implicit guarantee from the taxpayer. When ordinary Americans are confronted with these realities, they get angry. "People just don’t get how these institutions got bailed out and their people are still making big bonuses," Mark Zandi noted. "It just does not compute. No matter what you say, you can’t persuade them it’s right."