New York Times In Admiration On Timothy Geithner

Trigger

Just happened to read  the New York Times book review on Timothy Geithner's “Stress Test“. Thanks to the NYT we learn  more about an incompetent, foolish man who was at the helm of federal government during the time of Great Recession and financial crisis of 2008.

I have previously written another, critical blog post about this man and his new book here.

Salient Excerpts

Emphasis and comments added.

1. “The future Treasury secretary grew up everywhere and nowhere, a bit like a military brat, and came away from his childhood with a certain detachment from the American way of life: “At a local supermarket in suburban Virginia one summer, I was stunned to see an entire aisle stocked with pet food. It seemed bizarre in a world full of starving people.””
   [Thanks to NYT, we get more confirmation that this former U.S. treasury secretary and NY fed chief was and is a naive fool.]
2. “Politically, Geithner was more or less born a left-leaning Republican and appears to have become a right-leaning Democrat. …  As a student at Dartmouth in the early 1980s, he would have called himself a Republican, but “without much conviction.” …  “After The Dartmouth Review . . . published a ­McCarthy-style list of gay students on campus, I ran into a Review writer named Dinesh D’Souza at a coffee shop and asked him how it felt to be such a [expletive].””
   [What a man without conviction and what a bold guy to tell Dinesh D’Souza in College to be an expletive! Is there more such name dropping this book?]
3. “Oddly, for a Republican Ivy League graduate of the 1980s — and even more oddly for a future Treasury secretary — he found Wall Street pointless and the business world faintly ridiculous. He had no particular interest in money. “I did endure one job interview with a management consultant, whose first question was about how I would turn around a small failing beer company,” he writes. “I had no idea.””
   [Again who appointed this incompetent man for such a stellar career in the federal government?]
4. “The square that changed his life was Larry Summers, then a Treasury under secretary, who clearly saw in Geithner someone who would at least pretend not to be intimidated by him. But this part of the Timothy Geithner story — his rise in the world of important people — remains a bit vague.”
   [Was that it?]
5. “He became one of the guys who kept their heads as others lost theirs, defined less by what he was than by what he was not: in trouble. Mervyn King, the former governor of the Bank of England, joked (and as Geithner quotes him joking): “Tim was present at all the crises. But he didn’t cause the crises. The crises caused him.””
   [This is also typical for fools, they do not realize how serious the situation is!]
6. ““The fundamental causes of this crisis were familiar and straightforward,” Geithner writes. “It began with a mania — the widespread belief that devastating financial crises were a thing of the past, that future recessions would be mild, that gravity-defying home prices would never crash to earth.” ”
   [The causes were more like massive government failure in the form of affordable housing for everyone policies combined with recklessly low interest rates and toleration of ridiculous lending standards.]
7. “A few of the important people with a privileged view expressed concerns about the risks being taken, but most said nothing. Geithner counts himself in the minority. “I began asking questions about capital: Do our banks really have enough?” he writes, adding, “I was more worried than many of my colleagues, but I was not nearly worried enough.””
   [Sorry to say, but Timothy Geithner failed his job!]
8. “Interestingly, Geithner has little sympathy for those who wanted to see Wall Street bankers held accountable for whatever it was they had done. “Old Testament vengeance” is his pet phrase for such moralistic sentiments, and he argues persuasively that if he had indulged them, the crisis would only have caused more economic pain and suffering for ordinary people.”
   [What a weird viewpoint! Every day, numerous enterprises in a free market economy go bust for various reasons. If there is overinvestment in an economy fueled by reckless government policies, then more enterprises go bust than usual. ]
9. “He says President Obama very quickly grasped the merits of ignoring the desire for vengeance, and didn’t ask him to pursue some other, more punitive strategy. As if to ensure that no one leaves confused about his point of view on all this, Geithner argues at the end of his book that the only serious weakness of the Dodd-Frank financial reform measures is that they don’t give the federal government enough power to bail out banks in future crises.”
   [It only gets worse! What was going on in their minds, i.e. Geithner and president Obama? Dodd-Frank aptly named after two other characters/senators involved in the Great Recession is one of those massive big government take control laws.]
10. “The decisions he made are easier to criticize than they are to improve upon. I doubt many readers will put his book down and think the man did anything but his best. On his feet he might have stammered and wavered. That in itself was always a sign he was unusually brave.”
    [Thus ends the glowing review by the NYT.]