Stock markets will be down on Monday, Tuesday, ...

I will be surprised if they don't--after strong opinions like this:

John McCain and Richard Shelby, two high-profile Republican senators, said on Sunday that the government should allow a number of the biggest American banks to fail.

“Close them down, get them out of business,” Mr. Shelby, the senior Republican on the Banking Committee, told ABC’s “This Week With George Stephanopoulos.” “If they’re dead, they ought to be buried.”

While the Alabama senator did not say which banks to shutter, he suggested that Citigroup might be on that list, saying the bank has “always been a problem child.”

Mr. McCain, appearing on “Fox News Sunday,” echoed that sentiment without identifying any banks. Mr. McCain, who lost the presidential election last November, also accused the Treasury Department of avoiding the “hard decision” to let “these banks fail.”

And how about this one:

Republican Sens. John McCain of Arizona and Richard Shelby of Alabama said they want the automaker to seek bankruptcy protection, which would allow for reorganization.

"I think the best thing that could probably happen to General Motors, in my view, is they go into Chapter 11, they reorganize, they renegotiate their — the union management contracts and come out of it a stronger, better, leaner and more competitive automotive industry," McCain said on "Fox News Sunday."

Shelby, appearing on ABC's "This Week," said Chrysler and Ford as well as GM belong in Chapter 11 and then could get federal money as part of the process of reorganization.

Meanwhile, the treasury secretary, .... well, read this:

Henry Blodget thinks it is time for Timothy Geithner to go. So far, Geithner's performance has been shockingly unimpressive. It's not as if he's walking into the crisis anew; he's been the head of the New York Fed for years, and dealing with these issues from the very beginning. Yet on the really crucial problem of what to do about the banking system, he's been very nearly silent, going to Congress with a non-plan-plan that terrified the very markets it was supposed to reassure. Blodget also has a point when he says that Geithner has been mysteriously stuck on his original ideas. I would add that he seems mysteriously stuck on them, but not willing to pay the political cost of executing them, which is the worst of both worlds.

On the other hand, though I've so far been underwhelmed by his performance, we can hardly fire him, because who on earth would replace him?