James S. Brady Press Briefing Room
ROBERT GIBBS: My apologies for being late. Let me just take a second and get set up here. A couple quick announcements before we get started. The President spoke today with Governor Henry of Oklahoma, and both Senators Inhofe and Coburn about the deadly tornadoes that struck there, and passed along his condolences and best wishes to the victims.
Later this afternoon, as many of you know, state transportation officials from nearly every state are here at the White House and speaking with Secretary LaHood. They will be visiting the stakeout location at 3:15 p.m. to discuss infrastructure needs and projects that are ready to go, once a recovery and reinvestment plan is through Congress and signed by the President. So you guys can go out and hear all of them.
And with that, let's take a few questions. Yes, ma'am.
[REPORTER]: Thanks, Robert. Going back to Secretary Geithner's announcement yesterday on the bailout, can you talk about why the administration didn't realize that the market reaction was going to be so bad, and why there weren't more details attached to it?
GIBBS: Well, let me -- I'm going to give a broader answer to -- sort of a broader walk-through of the plan. But one of the things I'll talk about is that yesterday's speech and framework were not designed for a one-day market reaction. I think we can all go back in the 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. The plan that the Secretary outlined is not designed, though, to take care of the market for one day.
Let me walk through just sort of a little bit broader answer on the plan, though. Obviously, as many of you know, we've dealt with this for quite some time. This is an enormously complicated problem. And to date, the program that has dealt with many of these bad investments and bad assets has been flawed. It's important that as we move forward, that the government is able to follow through on the commitments that it makes.
Secretary Geithner understands that, again, as I said, this is not going to be judged on the one-day market reaction, but instead by what is best for the long-term economic health of America.
Understand -- let's understand a few things of what the Secretary talked about yesterday. He outlined -- what he outlined was comprehensive. It addresses not simply the needs of banks, but also the financial system in general, as well as the needed access to capital by America's businesses and families. It's based on transparency and integrity, through a comprehensive scrub of the financial system and a rigorous evaluation of the need in the financial system. And it recognizes that the problem cannot be solved and will not be solved with taxpayer funding alone; that this must work with and for the private sector.
Some of that market reaction may be based on what the plan does not 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, or that insurance that -- whose cost is borne primarily by the taxpayers but might primarily benefit shareholders isn't, in this case, part of that solution.
I've counseled many times in my very brief tenure of standing up here not to always judge leaks in the newspaper as fact. I know -- I have no doubt that at some point in this briefing today somebody is going to ask me about Secretary Gates and the decision to send more troops to Afghanistan -- a decision I have counseled that the President has yet to make, despite reading it many times in the newspaper. 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.
[REPORTER]: Are you talking about --
GIBBS: That's certainly one of them, yes.
[REPORTER]: If I could just push back just a little bit, I mean, I understand you're -- you want to play down the implications of one day in the market. But markets thrive on certainty, and a lot of the commentary yesterday was that there wasn't enough certainty, there wasn't enough detail in the plan for them to know what it would do. Maybe it is the right thing, but how do they know if they're not given a clearer readout?