Geithner says financial and economic conditions have improved significantly over past year

Geithner recognizes anniversary of first speech

WASHINGTON — Federal agencies may have been shut by a winter blizzard, but the Treasury Department wanted to remind people that Wednesday was the one-year anniversary of Timothy Geithner’s maiden speech as Treasury secretary.

That speech turned out to be a botched rollout of a bank rescue plan that sent the Dow Jones industrial average plunging by 382 points on Feb. 10, 2009, as markets questioned whether the new Obama administration’s plan to deal with the worst U.S. financial crisis since the 1930s would really work.

To answer the doubters, Treasury put out a two-page fact sheet Wednesday showing the improvements that have occurred in the financial system and the overall economy over the past year.

“A year later, the actions we took, alongside the Recovery Act, have worked to restore economic growth and financial stability,” Geithner said in a statement. “Access to credit is improving and the cost of borrowing for businesses, consumers, homeowners and state and local governments has fallen sharply.”

The Treasury fact sheet said that a year ago, the estimated cost of the financial bailout had been put at $550 billion but in the administration’s new budget released a week ago, that figure was reduced to less than $120 billion and the president has proposed a tax on large banks to recoup any losses from the program.

Treasury said while progress has been made, many problems remain that the administration is working to address from unfreezing credit for small businesses to helping to mitigate a rising tide of home mortgage foreclosures.

“The financial system is healing, but still damaged and we have a lot of repair work ahead,” Geithner said.

Republican critics have charged that the administration has mismanaged the $700 billion Troubled Asset Relief Program, or TARP, and that the administration should have shut the program down last October rather than deciding to extend it for another year.