Wait

Geithner has given Wall Street a terrific orgasm, but it’s too early to say whether he cleverly turned a bad hand into a great hand-job or just postponed the déluge. The underlying debate about whether the big banks are illiquid (Geither, Summers) or insolvent (Krugman, Roubini) is still with us.

There is plenty of precedent for not taking the current euphoria at face value—kind of like SIVs and CDOs from Lehman Brothers. Every time the government has intervened dramatically to pull us back from the precipice, the financial markets have rallied only to reverse course and sink even further once the warm afterglow has faded into a clammy sweat.

If Geithner’s plan works, we will forget the fact that the Obama Administration missed a gigantic opportunity to put into practice the ‘personal responsibility’ mantra that Mr O is fond of by chasing the guilty gamblers and moneychangers out of their ruined behemoths through direct state intervention, a.k.a. the N-word (nationalization). Too bad, but not disastrous.

If, however, the latest scheme tanks because these mega-entities really are zombies that cannot be brought back to life, then we have a really depressing scenario: the progressive, people-first, hopefully audacious, once-in-a-lifetime, broomstick-wielding Obama team has just poured unimaginable sums of public cash into the private pockets of the rich.

Not just depressing but also dangerous because the next wild swing away from the Obama promise is likely to be in a most unappealing direction.