Financial Times columnist Martin Wolf asks:
Has Barack Obama's presidency already failed? In normal times, this would be a ludicrous question. But these are not normal times. They are times of great danger.
To American liberal ears this sounds initially like a right-wing straw question meant to discredit the three-week old Obama administration. But Wolf is no Michelle Malkin or Ann Coulter, he is a serious economics writer.
The piece goes on to ask whether Obama's approach to the banking crisis, which Wolf describes as beset by "three arbitrary, self-imposed constraints: no nationalisation; no losses for bondholders; and no more money from Congress", can save an insolvent banking system burdened with "toxic" mortgage backed assets.
Wolf writes that treasury secretary Tim Geithner's wispy plan outlined yesterday is a poor way to make banks solvent, in part because big subsidies go to failed institutions with the worst balance sheets.
He continues:
The correct advice remains the one the US gave the Japanese and others during the 1990s: admit reality, restructure banks and, above all, slay zombie institutions at once.
