Surowiecki gets bold in defense of Tim Geithner’s non-boldness

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Jim Surowiecki, riffing on my post from last week on possible reasons for Treasury’s less-than-bold approach to the banking crisis, which was itself a riff on a Ryan Avent riff on a Gary Weiss profile of Tim Geithner (yes, we bloggers are news-gathering dynamoes), writes:

It’s true that the administration’s approach may not be bold in the sense of being radical, but no one believes that boldness is, in itself, a good thing or that the more radical a solution is, the better it must be. (The Bush Administration’s decision to invade Iraq was certainly bold and radical. That didn’t make it any less of a mistake.) More important, the boldness issue is really a red herring. Obama’s critics’ problem with the Administration isn’t really that they think it should act more decisively: it’s that they think the Administration should act differently.

That’s not entirely right. At least some of the criticism of the Administration’s approach to the banks comes from people like me who wonder why the President and Treasury Secretary have never articulated their strategy as clearly as Jim Surowiecki has.

Update: At lunch today I sat at the same table as a Kurdish official who said the U.S. invasion of Iraq will go down in history as one of the best things ever. I forgot to ask him what Geithner should do about the banks.