Geithner goes for a laundry list, not a dramatic gesture

A long slog it is, then.
I'd like to think that the quality of the lesson learned from this whole fiasco is directly proportional to the time it takes to recover from it. It we suffer substantially for an extended period of time, we will be less likely to suffer from short term memory loss.

Maybe I'm dumb and missing something obvious here, but I still don't know why no one in the government or economic press is talking about distillation. That is, consolidating all these bad assets and then breaking them up into their component parts so we can get whatever real value is buried in them out and then rework or foreclose or eat the loss or whatever on the true, total junk that's left.

I retract my name of HotSauce for TARP II. It should be referred to as Zombie Economics.
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Zombie Economics, unlike Voodoo Economics, might work but it will take a long time and a good bit of experimentation to figure out how to behead the walking dead of assets which are still hidden on the bank's books.
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From hence forth, I will refer to any plan that helps troubled assets as Zombie Economics!

@Sean: I think the main problem there is that it's too early to tell what the real value might be on a particular asset. Without a market, the value may be nil. With a more liquid market, it may be substantial.

Curmudgeon,
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That's kind of the whole point of distillation. You (the govt) just arbitrarily guesses at a price, buys EVERYTHING at that price, then distills and sells everything out. Because you know, we actually CAN price the little bits and individual pieces these big complex securities are made of.

Possibly. But our masters in government are afraid to pull that trigger, afraid that they may guess wrong on that price and be really on the hook for a trillion dollars or so. History would probably treat them unkindly, and history is really the only benefit of senior government service.