A week earlier, ace CNBC reporter Charlie Gasparino scooped the speech by chronicling how Wall Streeters advising the Obama administration talked Geithner out of a government-backed “bad bank” that would somehow buy toxic assets to be either worked out profitably or resold to private investors. These were the same “greedy” executives that Obama and Geithner had been trashing. So now Geithner talks vaguely about some sort of public/private investment fund that will use government capital and provide financing for private investors, who are then supposed to buy toxic assets.

Nobody on Wall Street is buying it right now. Geithner said the fund might cost $1 trillion, but there’s no “there” there. No wonder bank stocks dropped 12 percent on Tuesday.

By the way, Geithner did not offer any regulatory accounting relief, such as putting an end to the disastrous mark-to-market rule that has wrecked bank capital and is one of the root causes of the whole financial problem.

Geithner did talk about an expansion of the Fed’s Term Asset-Backed Lending Facility, or TALF, to help finance consumer-loan securitization packages that provide upwards of 40 percent of all consumer and small-business lending. This might work, but again there were no details. And the Fed has yet to start its TALF operation.

Finally, Geithner talked about a comprehensive $50 billion housing-and-mortgage modification plan. But once again, no details -- especially on the controversial issue of having bankruptcy judges determine home-loan interest rates and lending totals without bank recourse to contractual obligations.

One positive comes from a New York Times story claiming that Geithner beat back Obama’s political advisers who want to nationalize big banks, fire senior bank executives, and establish heavy government controls over bank operations. But at the end of the day the absence of any clarity or pragmatic details from Mr. Geithner left stock markets sadder and poorer for the effort.

Geithner would have been better off not giving a speech until he could put real meat on the bones. What he pulled Tuesday was a classic rookie move that will further erode the public’s trust in his capabilities. Following the controversy over his late payment of taxes, this bank-plan blunder could be another nail in his coffin. Apparently, Tim Geithner is not yet ready for prime time.