Krugman doesn't like Geithner's bank plan:

Over the weekend The Times and other newspapers reported leaked details about the Obama administration’s bank rescue plan, which is to be officially released this week. If the reports are correct, Tim Geithner, the Treasury secretary, has persuaded President Obama to recycle Bush administration policy — specifically, the “cash for trash” plan proposed, then abandoned, six months ago by then-Treasury Secretary Henry Paulson.

This is more than disappointing. In fact, it fills me with a sense of despair.

After all, we’ve just been through the firestorm over the A.I.G. bonuses, during which administration officials claimed that they knew nothing, couldn’t do anything, and anyway it was someone else’s fault. Meanwhile, the administration has failed to quell the public’s doubts about what banks are doing with taxpayer money.

And now Mr. Obama has apparently settled on a financial plan that, in essence, assumes that banks are fundamentally sound and that bankers know what they’re doing.

It’s as if the president were determined to confirm the growing perception that he and his economic team are out of touch, that their economic vision is clouded by excessively close ties to Wall Street. And by the time Mr. Obama realizes that he needs to change course, his political capital may be gone.

But the stock market does:

Wall Street got the news it wanted on the economy's biggest problems -- banks and housing -- and celebrated by hurtling the Dow Jones industrials up nearly 500 points.

Investors added rocket fuel Monday to a two-week-old advance, cheering the government's plan to help banks remove bad assets from their books and also welcoming a report showing a surprising increase in home sales. Major stock indicators surged about 7 percent, including the Dow, which had its biggest percentage gain since October.

If Krugman is right about Geithner's plan basically being a recycled version of the Paulson Plan, the stock market's positive response is a sort of vindication for the Bush administration's bold crisis management in late 2008.  The problem with the Paulson Plan bears a certain resemblance to the Iraq War: it was a bold, unorthodox, big expensive radical move that actually got it right, but was not adequately explained to the public.