WASHINGTON (Reuters) - Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner said on Wednesday the Obama administration was working on a plan to repair the battered financial system and boost recovery that should be ready fairly soon.
"We are looking at a range of options," Geithner said as he started a meeting with department officials charged with oversight of the Troubled Asset Relief Program (TARP), adding:
"We hope to make decisions and be in a position relatively soon" to make them public.
Geithner ducked a reporter's question about whether Treasury was considering setting up a "bad bank" to take toxic assets off the balance sheets of banks as some Capitol Hill Democrats have indicated has been under discussion.
Geithner, who was sworn in as Treasury chief on Monday, heads the Obama administration's effort to overhaul the TARP and make Treasury more responsive to public complaints that its decisions on how to use taxpayer money are hidden and that it has failed to revive bank lending.
TARP is a $700-billion program that Treasury was using under the Bush administration to try to stabilize banks by injecting capital into them.
Geithner said Treasury will make the process more open to public scrutiny and met with top officials including Neil Barofsky, the TARP special inspector general, and members of the Congressional Oversight Panel to discuss efforts to improve accountability and transparency.
"In the coming weeks, we will unveil a series of reforms to help stabilize the nation's financial system and get credit flowing again to families and businesses," Geithner said.
He announced that, beginning immediately, Treasury was posting all its TARP investment agreements on the Internet at: http://www.treas.gov/initiatives/eesa/agreements/index.shtml
It will show contracts for future completed transactions within five to 10 business days after they are completed.
In response to a reporter's question whether he wanted to avoid nationalizing banks, or having the government take them over, Geithner indicated he had little taste for that idea.
"We have a financial system that is run by private shareholders, managed by private institutions, and we'd like to do our best to preserve that system," he said.
(Reporting by Glenn Somerville; Editing by James Dalgleish)
