Timothy Geithner Quotes

There is a basic lesson on financial crises that governments tend to wait too long, underestimate the risks, want to do too little. And it ultimately gets away from them, and they end up spending more money, causing much more damage to the economy.

2008 was to the American economy what 9/11 was to national security. Yet while 9/11 prompted the U.S. government to tear up half the Constitution in the name of public safety, after 2008, authorities went in the other direction.

For the next three years, we're going to see different economies work out different problems. For European economies, especially Greece, it would be through default.

The Federal Reserve, the Treasury, all the regulator agencies - if there's a problem of the financial mechanism in society, the only one to fix it is government. They've got a legitimate role.

There is a difference between strategic or technical default and default where you really don't have the economy to support the spending. We are not at that point yet. We could be. We could be, like some European nations.

No one suggested Lehman deserved to be saved. But the argument has been made that the crisis might have been less severe if it had been saved, because Lehman's failure created remarkable uncertainty in the market as investors became confused about the role of the government and whether it was picking winners and losers.

Bailouts may have been more tolerable in the early 1990s when they were rare and their use for a failing bank was uncertain. That is no longer the case.

The idea that either individuals or organisations are 'too big to fail' or that the tech and start-up sector is somehow different is wrong.

No bank should be allowed to become so big that it can blackmail governments.

The Fed was largely responsible for converting what might have been a garden-variety recession, although perhaps a fairly severe one, into a major catastrophe. Instead of using its powers to offset the depression, it presided over a decline in the quantity of money by one-third from 1929 to 1933 ... Far from the depression being a failure of the free-enterprise system, it was a tragic failure of government.

Whatever the economy needs to maintain itself, the government will do it.

The failure of Lehman Brothers demonstrated that liquidity provision by the Federal Reserve would not be sufficient to stop the crisis; substantial fiscal resources were necessary.

The failure of Lehman may have allowed the government to do more to prop up the economy than it otherwise could.

The Federal Reserve has always recognized the importance of allowing markets to work, and government oversight of financial firms will never be fully effective without the aid of strong market discipline.

What I object to the current government intervention in so-called 'solving the crisis', they haven't solved anything. They've just postponed it.

I take office during the most difficult moment in the country's recent history. The country can be saved - it's up to us. I think it is obvious for those who support this government to undertake the commitment and ensure that our country's euro membership is not endangered.

Financial crises are an unfortunate but necessary consequence of modern capitalism.

The details of what the Fed did were kept secret until a provision in the Dodd-Frank Act that I sponsored required the Government Accountability Office to audit the Fed's lending programs during the financial crisis.

I started out in public service in 1998 after the Asian financial crisis of '97.

Governments need to be authorized to provide 'open bank assistance.' The convolutions of Dodd-Frank aimed at 'avoiding' this tactic are ludicrous and will prove to be extremely costly to the system.

The President and the Democrats on Congress have exploited the financial crisis to advance their socialist big government tax, spend and borrow agenda.

I think that if we don't get these politicians to come together we face the most predictable economic crisis in history.

I think there will be no government bankruptcy in Greece.

From the beginning of time, we've had financial crises. People always blame the banks and for good reason. When you look for the root causes, they're almost always failed government policies.

Nationalization, unmentionable only yesterday, has entered common usage not least because an even scarier word - depression - is next on America's list to avoid.