Questions for Mr. Geithner

The Congressional Oversight Panel on the Treasury's actions to get us out of our current situation has in its latest report a few questions for Mr. Geithner (my emphasis):

There are many questions that we believe must be addressed in coming weeks, but we ask you to focus your attention on one immediate issue. Treasury has not explained how its financial stabilization programs fit together to address the problems that caused this crisis. This failure to connect specific programs to a clear strategy aimed at the root causes of the crisis has produced uncertainty and drained your work of public support. Financial institutions, businesses, and consumers will not return to healthy investment in the economy if they fear that the federal government is careening from one crisis to another without an intelligible road map.

For these reasons, we ask that you provide answers to the following questions about
Treasury’s current views and the approach outlined in the Administration’s recently-issued Financial Stability Plan. Please answer each question in detail and please indicate the economic or other evidence on which your each answer rests:

1. What do you believe the primary causes of the financial crisis to have been? Are those causes continuing? How does your overall strategy for using Treasury authority and taxpayer funds address those causes?
2. What is the best way to recapitalize the banking system? How does your answer
relate to your assessment of the causes of the financial crisis?
3. What is your view of the economic status of the American consumer and the
amount that constitutes a healthy debt burden for the consumer? The Consumer
and Business Lending Initiative and elements of the Homeowner Affordability
and Stability Plan are designed to restart consumer purchases of homes and
automobiles, but the success of these programs depends on the ability of
consumers to absorb more debt. Has Treasury developed any data to determine
whether consumers can shoulder the additional debt to power these initiatives?

The report begins with some interesting comments about our detailed knowledge of the mortgage situation.

To develop this report, we explored the available data and discovered how little is known about the current state of mortgage performance across the country. The ability of federal banking and housing regulatory agencies to gather and analyze this data is hampered by the lack of a nationwide loan performance data reporting requirement on the industry. Consequently, there is no comprehensive private or government source for accurately tracking loan delinquencies and loss mitigation efforts, including foreclosures and modifications, on a complete, national scale. No federal agency has the ability to track delinquencies and loss mitigation efforts for more than 60 percent of the market. Existing data are plagued by inconsistencies in collection methodologies and reporting, and the numbers are often simply unverifiable. Worse still, the data that are collected are often not the data needed for answering key questions, such as, what are causing mortgage defaults and why loan modifications have not been working. The United States is now two years into a foreclosure crisis that has brought economic collapse, and federal banking and housing regulators still know surprisingly little about the number of foreclosures, what is driving the foreclosures, and the efficacy of mitigation efforts. The Panel endorses a much more vigorous plan to collect critical foreclosure data.

Granted Geithner has only been at the job for a short time, but he was head of the NY Fed and should be more aware of the issues. And, of course, there is the issue of staffing the Treasury, which is going very slowly. Geithner needs help, but does he acknowledge it? Why isn't the Economic Recovery Advisory Board involved more? Has the board even met? There is talent and experience there and we can use all of that that we have.