Things are getting worse abroad, and Geithner is getting overwhelmed...

Two separate news items from today's Times.

1. A Rising Dollar Lifts the U.S. but Adds to the Crisis Abroad
2. Geithner, With Few Aides, Faces Challenges

In fact, these are actually related items, but related in a scary way...

"The crisis abroad":

The pursuit of capital suddenly seems like a zero sum game. A dollar invested by foreign central banks and investors in American government bonds is a dollar that is not available to Eastern European countries desperately seeking to refinance debt. It is a dollar that cannot reach Africa, where many countries are struggling with the loss of aid and foreign investment.
“Virtually all of the low-income countries are in very serious trouble,” said Eswar Prasad, a former official at the International Monetary Fund and a senior fellow at the Brookings Institution, the liberal-leaning research organization in Washington.
He went on: “This is the third wave of the financial crisis. Low-income countries are getting hit very hard. The flow of private capital to the emerging market has dried up.”

Geithner 'facing challenges':

WASHINGTON — Rarely have so few people had so little time to prop up so many pillars of the economy as those in the Treasury Department under Timothy F. Geithner.

In the six weeks since Mr. Geithner took over as Treasury secretary, he and a skeleton crew of unofficial senior advisers have been racing to make decisions that will shape the future of the banking, insurance, housing and automobile industries.

But even as he maintains a frenetic pace — unveiling plans, testifying before Congress and negotiating new bailouts with the likes of Citigroup, General Motors and the American International Group — there are signs that events are getting ahead of him

Fun. As the world melts down all around us, the Treasury Department is barely functional. Makes me very worried that no one's doing the necessary planning and thinking about that crucial G-20 meeting in only three weeks. Prospects for a coordinated global response get dimmer by the day, and prospects for a collapse only grow....