Rogers: Geithner and Summers Clueless

Investment superstar Jim Rogers blasted Treasury Secretary Tim Geithner’s plan to overhaul the financial system bailout.

Rogers told CNBC that the plan will push the U.S. debt higher and was created by the same people who failed to see the crisis coming.

Geithner, formerly president of the New York Federal Reserve Bank and a Treasury official in the Clinton administration “has been dead wrong about everything for 15 years in a row,” Rogers says.

And the same is true of principal White House economic advisor Lawrence Summers, who was Treasury Secretary under Clinton, Rogers maintains.

“If I were on your show 15 weeks in a row and was wrong, you'd probably never invite me back,” he says.

“These guys have been wrong year after year after year consistently, and here they are making the same mistakes again. This is not going to solve the problem. It's going to make it worse.”

Rogers did sound one note of optimism. Eventually the banking system will rebound, he says.

“This is not the first time banks have gone bankrupt,” he explains.

“At the same time, there are a lot of banks that got it right and who are waiting for this.”

The financial markets didn’t like Geithner’s plan either. Markets tanked as he spoke on Tuesday, falling several hundred points.

“The lack of clarity” on a public-private investment fund “has the market upset,” Joseph Keating, chief investment officer at RBC Private Asset Management, told Bloomberg.

“Nationalization could have been a better outcome for some banks.”

By: Dan Weil © 2009 Newsmax