I can think of very few reasons (none of them good) why Obama is so determined not to fix the actual problems in the banking industry. Economist James Galbraith spells out what needs to be done:

When the crisis went public in August 2007, Henry Paulson's Treasury took every step to prevent the final collapse from happening before the 2008 elections, extracting billions from the Federal Housing Authority and from Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac to relieve the pressure on bank balance sheets. It worked until it didn't. In September 2008 the collapse of Lehman triggered the collapse of American International Group (AIG) and the steps that led to the Troubled Assets Relief Program (TARP) and to the effective nationalization of the commercial paper market, meaning that the Federal Reserve has become the primary short-term funder of major American corporations.

Upon taking office, President Obama had a chance to change course and didn't take it. By seizing the largest problem banks, the government could have achieved clean audits, replaced top management, cured destructive compensation practices, shrunk a bloated industry, and cut the banks' lobbying power and therefore their capacity to obstruct financial reform. The way to write-downs of bad mortgage debt and therefore to financial recovery would have been opened.

None of this happened. Instead the Treasury administered fake "stress tests" and relaxed mark-to-market accounting rules for toxic assets which permitted the banks to defer losses and to continue to carry trash on their books at inflated values. This reassured the banks that they would not be permitted to fail—and so back to bonuses-as-usual they went. The banks survived, and the administration today claims this “proves” they didn’t need to be taken over. But to what end did they survive? The banks are bigger, more powerful, and more obstructionist than ever—and largely uninterested in making new commercial, industrial, or residential loans.

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The New York Times stated the obvious this morning:

It is also painfully clear that more of the same black-hole bailouts are failing to restore stability or confidence. Stock markets worldwide tanked on Monday. A growing chorus of economists and commentators — including this page — are urging the Obama administration to adopt a more comprehensive solution: a government-run restructuring, or nationalization.

The government would not only take an ownership stake in firms that require extensive and ongoing bailouts — as it has done with A.I.G. and Citigroup — but also direct control of the weakest ones. It would get a realistic assessment of the assets crippling them and revamp their finances before returning them to the private sector, where they would be smaller and healthier and could start lending again.

We know that many Americans are uncomfortable with the word nationalization — politicians even more so. But each new bailout of old losers only feeds mistrust of the government and weakens public support for the even tougher decisions to come.

Exactly right. As long as the administration postpones the day of reckoning for the banks, using all these pointless stalling tactics to put off the need for the government to simply take over, the market won't bounce back. Everyone knows some (maybe most) of the major banks are already insolvent, and the "bad bank" idea is little more than a joke at this point:

Fears that the world’s economies are even weaker than had been thought ricocheted around the globe on Monday as investors from Hong Kong to London to New York bailed out of stocks.

Losses cascaded from one market to the next as concern spread that government efforts had not been enough to stabilize troubled financial institutions or broader economies. Only by Tuesday morning did markets show signs of stabilizing, with key indexes in Asia showing more modest declines.

But Monday’s losses were bad everywhere, and particularly severe in Europe, where an emergency meeting over the weekend ended in bickering and the rejection of a bailout plea from Hungary.

[...] “It’s pretty despondent everywhere,” said Dwyfor Evans, a strategist at State Street Global Markets in Hong Kong. “O.K., there are signs that some of the leading indicators have stabilized to some extent, but it’s at a very, very low level, and we’re not seeing corporate investment picking up, or consumers starting to spend again — in other words, the traditional mechanisms by which economies come out of a recession are absent at this time.”

Why more of this creeping incrementalism? If the banks are in such bad shape that they need U.S. ownership to stay afloat, isn't that pretty much the time to stop the charade? When even Alan Greenspan is saying to nationalize the banks, isn't it time to actually, you know, do it?

Citigroup Inc. is in talks with federal officials that could result in the U.S. government substantially expanding its ownership of the struggling bank, according to people familiar with the situation.

While the discussions could fall apart, the government could wind up holding as much as 40% of Citigroup's common stock. Bank executives hope the stake will be closer to 25%, these people said.

Any such move would give federal officials far greater influence over one of the world's largest financial institutions. Citigroup has proposed the plan to its regulators. The Obama administration hasn't indicated if it supports the plan, according to people with knowledge of the talks.

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Interesting WSJ interview with Nouriel Roubini, the man who saw the crash coming and tried to sound the alarm:

"Again, I don't want to personalize things, but the last decade was one of self-regulation. But in the financial markets, without proper institutional rules, there's the law of the jungle -- because there's greed! There's nothing wrong with greed, per se. It's not that people are more greedy now than they were 20 years ago. But greed has to be tempered, first, by fear of losses. So if you bail people out, there's less fear. And second, by prudential regulation and supervision to avoid certain excesses."

How does Mr. Roubini think the media has covered the financial crisis? "The problem," he says -- after first stating to me that he intends "no offense!" -- "is that in the bubble years, everyone becomes a cheerleader, including the media. This is the time when journalists should be asking tough questions, and I think there was a failure there. The Masters of the Universe were always on the cover, or the front page -- the hedge-fund guys, the imperial CEO, private equity. I wish there had been more financial and business journalists, in the good years, who'd said, 'Wait a moment, if this man, or this firm, is making a 100% return a year, how do they do it? Is it because they're smarter than everybody else . . . or because they're taking so much risk they'll be bankrupt two years down the line?'

"And I think, in the bubble years, no one asked the hard questions. A good journalist has to be one who, in good times, challenges the conventional wisdom. If you don't do that, you fail in one of your duties."

[...] Mr. Roubini tells me that bank nationalization "is something the partisans would have regarded as anathema a few weeks ago. But when I and others put it in the context of the Swedish approach [of the 1990s] -- i.e. you take banks over, you clean them up, and you sell them in rapid order to the private sector -- it's clear that it's temporary. No one's in favor of a permanent government takeover of the financial system."

There's another reason why the concept should appeal to (fiscal) conservatives, he explains. "The idea that government will fork out trillions of dollars to try to rescue financial institutions, and throw more money after bad dollars, is not appealing because then the fiscal cost is much larger. So rather than being seen as something Bolshevik, nationalization is seen as pragmatic. Paradoxically, the proposal is more market-friendly than the alternative of zombie banks."

In any case, Republicans must now temper their reactions, he says. "The kind of government interference in the economy that we saw in the last year of Bush was unprecedented. The central bank -- supposed to be the lender of the last resort -- became the lender of first and only resort! With our recapitalizing of financial institutions, and massive government intervention in the markets, we've already crossed a significant bridge."

So, will the highest level of government be receptive to the bank-nationalization idea? "I think it will," Mr. Roubini says, unhesitatingly. "People like Graham and Greenspan have already given their explicit blessing. This gives Obama cover." And how long will it be before the administration goes in formally for nationalization? "I think that we're going to see the policy adopted in the next few months . . . in six months or so."

That long? I ask. "Six months from now," he replies, "even firms that today look solvent are going to look insolvent. Most of the major banks -- almost all of them -- are going to look insolvent. In which case, if you take them all over all at once, you cause less damage than if you would if you took over a couple now, and created so much confusion and panic and nervousness.