Geithner ducks tough questions

Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner ducked the tough questions investors want answered as he rolled out a plan to repair the financial system - and stock traders made him pay for it.

Driving investor doubts was Geithner's failure to clearly address three issues at the heart of the crisis: Will banks saddled with toxic debt be forced to fail? How will illiquid assets be removed from bank balance sheets? And what will be done to arrest the decline in house prices that triggered the turmoil?

The risk is that the market reaction sabotages the plan before it gets under way, forcing Geithner to change his approach in response - a position that his predecessor, Henry Paulson, frequently found himself in. That may mean the plan "may just end being an interim step," said Kenneth Rogoff, a former chief economist at the International Monetary Fund who's now a professor at Harvard.