Timothy Geithner's Memoir Is One Big Coverup For His Own Colossal Failures

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http://www.alternet.org/economy/timothy-geithners-memoir-one-big-coverup-his-own-colossal-failures


Former Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner’s memoir hit bookshelves this week. Titled Stress Test: Reflections on Financial Crises, the book recounts the financial crisis and the White House’s response to it, but offers little more than a self-serving effort to polish the one-time member of the Obama administration’s legacy.

The “stress tests” Geithner placed on the big banks in return for the government's $700 billion bailout, were made so easy they ended up proving nothing, other than the Treasury’s inability, or unwillingness to demand tough concessions from Wall Street.

Geithner launches a sustained and misdirected attack against progressives and economic populists on the Left. About Senator Elizabeth Warren (D-MA), Geithner writes, “Her criticisms of the financial rescue, if well intentioned, were mostly unjustified, and her TARP oversight hearings often felt more like made-for-YouTube inquisitions than serious inquiries.” He adds, “She was worried about the right things, but she was better at impugning our choices—as well as our integrity and our competence —than identifying any feasible alternatives.”

On no fewer than two dozen occasions, Geithner invokes the Bible to describe economic populists who wished for tough justice to be carried out against the Wall Street banks that crashed the economy. “The Old Testament view that the venal should be punished. The irresponsible shouldn’t be bailed out,” is how he mocks liberal critics such as Warren. He cites the Left’s appetite for “Old Testament vengeance,” “Old Testament justice,” “Old Testament impulses,” “Old Testament populism,” and “Old Testament cravings."