Wallstreet is basically a huge Ponzi scheme

Geithner declares that the government - actually the taxpayers have to take the risk*
Who the f... is he to know and put up trillions of dollars at risk at high risk - that's not the only solution - its rather the wrong solution.
The Government could use the same money to give direct credit to Mainstreet - no one needs private banks to do that. Let banks just go bust and guarantee for the people's accounts worth of cash would be step one. The next step would be to put up via Internet simple credit applications for the one's who need them like its done with Micro credits and the FED can pay out the money.
who needs fancy overrated bankers who can blow away in one year more money than made in one century. Who needs Harvard MBA's who are only trained for their own success but can not stand up to their duties ( that includes the last president).
The whole concept of success is a huge fraud as it never was based on real efficiency or solutions for the whole system. It was just a system to deliver incredible undeserved wealth for elitists who could arrange to get into the inner circle.
Do not think that those myths about Wallstreet are true and the bright ones make the money. They have some bright talented people there but the real money is made by insider schemes and manipulation of markets.
The profits they created up to 2007 from 2003 were mostly cooked and bubbled up were never real in most cases and the FED was a big part of this scam as they came up with this perverse FED-model to value markets which was bullshitting right from the start as they manipulated the data in the equation. Greenspan started that with Clinton as they started to manipulate the statistics of inflation down and therefor the GDP was always overrated. Therefor they claimed that stocks were cheap and forced everyone to jump on the train. The Emperor was naked but insisted he was wearing the most spectacular dress. The next thing in this derivatives was to create products they could mark up by their own liking and got the rating agencies to give the obscene AAA for junk. Finally they leveraged that phony products and made profits on paper which never existed and paid themselves perverse bonuses out.
Now the government has to take risk - I say they need a huge prison for this financial terrorists which dropped the whole world into a depression - instead they even pay themselves bonuses with tax money - how can they have such guts ? Because the government works for them they supported them all the way by not overseeing them and even changing legislation so they could just do what ever they liked. Geithner as the FED boss of NY was in charge of them and now a former Goldman partner has his job - Obama is not about change at all, he was made president by them and except for some media noise he does nothing about them.