Tim Geithner’s legacy: an unpopular bailout that helped save the economy

By Zachary A. Goldfarb, WashPost, Published: January 24

Treasury Secretary Timothy F. Geithner sat around a conference room table with his advisers as they relayed the concerns of banks protesting President Obama’s push for new rules for Wall Street.

Geithner, widely thought to be a friend of the financial industry, did not lend a sympathetic ear.

“F--- the banks,” he said, according to people familiar with the episode.

Geithner is set to step down Friday as Treasury secretary after four enormously consequential years as one of Obama’s top advisers — and, as that four-letter epithet suggests, a deeply paradoxical figure in American government.

Lawmakers, the news media and even some White House officials have caricatured him as a former banker, but Geithner has spent nearly his entire career in public service, and his friends note that he lives a life of unusual modesty. Former government watchdogs say he pursued generous bailouts for Wall Street and not for everyday Americans, but economists say rescuing the financial system averted another Great Depression and saved millions of jobs. Critics insist he sought to protect Wall Street’s reckless business model, but bankers and his allies alike agree he often ignored the positions of the financial industry in writing the legislation cracking down on risky behavior.

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