Timothy Geithner Quotes
To solve a major crisis, you have to do things you would never do in normal times or even in a modest crisis…. What feels just and fair is often just the opposite of what is required for a just and fair outcome. It is why policy makers generally tend to make crises worse, and why the politics of crises management is always untenable.
Tim Geithner, U.S. Secretary of the Treasury (Democrat), President, New York Federal Reserve Bank, Stress Test: Reflections on Financial Crises, 2014
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In the Meldown of 2008 which caused the Great Recession, he, his Republican Predecessor and Ben Bernanke, the Federal Reserve Chairman, I the opinion of most on ideological economists saved the American economy from a collapse that would have been as bad or worse than the Great Depression. However, to accomplish that they had to in effect bail out the banks, 2 of the 3 American Auto companies, and the largest insurance company with taxpayer money. Worse, they could not do much for the millions of Americans whose homes were “under water” as a result of the banks’ handling of home mortgages and mortgage backed securities. To help them, they would have had to force the banks to admit that their assets were much lower than the banks were claiming and the banking and financial executives had to be appeased. Meanwhile, they had few other resources and did not provide any help to Main Street, small business or even small banks. Worse, they were intimidated into allowing the subsidized and saved banks to pay huge bonuses to their executives whose performance was terrible while millions of normal Americans were unemployed and the others were getting no increase in compensation. See {639655} for Geither’s explanation of the problem.
Geithner and Federal Reserve Chairman Bernanke went way “out of the box”, using creative methods of preventing the crash of 2008 from turning into a major Depression. See {639655} for Geithner’s further explanation.
Timothy Franz Geithner is a former American central banker who served as the 75th United States Secretary of the Treasury under President Barack Obama, from 2009 to 2013. He was the President of the Federal Reserve Bank of New York from 2003 to 2009, following service in the Clinton administration. Since March 2014, he has served as president and managing director of Warburg Pincus, a private equity firm headquartered in New York City.
